


All the Grain of Babylon

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - After Earth, Cultural Misunderstandings, Disabled Characters, Dystopia, Inspired by the Pavlovsk Experimental Station, M/M, Naruto Sci-Fi Week 2020, Post-Apocalypse, Sunans are basically Morlocks with a Vulcan twist, Touch-Starved, Trans Characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:13:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27827317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: Sunagakure is an outpost’s outpost, the most hidden of the hidden villages. Situated deep in the bowels of the planet Kaze, aptly named for the devastating windstorms caused by its thin atmosphere, the village is mostly nomadic. Under attack, the entire village can close off its tunnel structure and relocate in less than twenty-four hours, so long as the location of the Seed Bank isn’t discovered.With Gaara as its leader and a code of strict cultural mores, the small underground society has survived, perhaps even thrived. But their safety and stability is put at risk when a ship crashes on the surface of Kaze, a ship whose crew claim to be the last known survivors of the long-abandoned planet Earth. And what the outsiders bring with them causes Gaara to question everything he's ever known ...
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 118
Kudos: 106
Collections: Naruto Sci-fi Week!





	1. Lost Civilization

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** in this story for significant societal ableism and scarcity mechanics, with ableist language used by main characters. Themes of eugenics with humans treated as breeding stock and experiments. Frank discussion and depiction of injuries and their sequelae. (Fantasy) animal death. Minor character deaths (off-screen). Societal homophobia and transphobia are major themes. This is very much an exploration of societal structures formed in high-pressure environments, and at times the characters express bigoted, challenging, and/or problematic views. 
> 
> I originally started writing this fic for [Naruto Sci-Fi Week](https://naruto-scifi-week.tumblr.com) last year, and didn't manage to finish it in time. Luckily, I was able to re-work it to fit this year's prompts! There will be 7 chapters, one for each day of prompts.

The ground shakes, and Gaara lurches out of bed. 

He’s on his feet in less than an instant, hands already groping for his nanite pod. His internal clock tells him it’s the middle of the night, and the surface will be wickedly cold. He slips on his thickest pair of magnetized gloves with fumbling, sleep drunk hands, and stumbles into the tunnels. 

The main tunnel to the surface is thronging with citizens already, most in states of half-undress, all carrying the ragtag miscellany of their weapons. The emergency lights with their red filters flicker along the tunnel’s ceiling. 

“Gaara!” someone barks breathlessly. He doesn’t recognize them in the dim, face covered in uniform tan balaclava and goggles to protect them from the night’s bitter cold. “Something’s landed.” A shift in stance reveals the tempered glass point of a rope javelin strapped to each hand, and the tremor at the end of the words reveals the speaker as Matsuri. 

“Intruders?” His voice is still gravelly from sleep, but the rabble falls silent the moment he speaks. 

Matsuri shakes her head. Red light flashes across the lenses of her goggles. “We don’t know yet.”

Gaara grits his teeth, then pulls his nanites up under him to fly forward. The masses part around him like wind-blown sand, then coalesce into a steady stream of footsteps following him up the tunnel’s slope. 

Sunagakure is an outpost’s outpost, the most hidden of the hidden villages. Situated deep in the bowels of the planet Kaze, aptly named for the devastating windstorms caused by its thin atmosphere, the village is mostly nomadic. Under attack, the entire village can close off its tunnel structure and relocate in less than twenty-four hours, so long as the location of the Seed Bank isn’t discovered. 

The Seed Bank’s exact location is a fiercely guarded secret, known to only a handful of the villagers. As Suna’s leader, Gaara is one of the few who carries its secrets; he serves as its caretaker and protector, and the survival of his small village relies upon it. The notorious ferocity of Suna’s villagers is enough to deter most would-be hungry thieves and colonists, but desperation makes fools of men. The village has had to defend against enough assaults that they’ve assumed a number of additional mythical monikers: Sunagakure, Space’s Graveyard; Sunagakure, the Bloody Gem of Kaze; Sunagakure, the Wind’s Coffin. 

The cold of the surface hits Gaara like a punch as he bursts through the door to the top of the lookout post. Temari and her troupe of night watchmen are already gathered along the roof’s edge. 

“A ship just touched down,” she shouts over the wind. It picks up her words and whips them away with the flapping of the thick layers of her surface suit. “About two klicks pole-ward.” 

“Touched down or crashed?” Gaara asks, fingers twitching in his gloves. He steps closer to hear her better, close enough that the ghosting cloud formed by the warmth of her breath almost reaches him. “The impact almost brought the tunnels down.”

“Don’t know,” Temari says, and the tone of her voice is unreadable over the howling of the wind. “Kankuro went to check it out.”

“Hostiles?” 

“If they are, they’re awful at it. No weapons on the exterior of their ship, at least.” Temari gestures to the watchman behind the spyglass, another nondescript figure swathed in sandy tan and goggles. On a night without a sandstorm, the spyglass can see a quarter of the way across the tiny planet’s surface. “It’s small, too. Probably can’t hold more than a dozen people. Kankuro should be able to handle it.”

Gaara peers over the roof’s edge, but the surface is all in darkness, nothing visible to the naked eye beyond the rim of hazy lights dotting the building’s exits. Kaze as a planet is too small to sustain the orbit of a moon, and the nights are pitch black. Gaara scans the horizon, but all he can make out are the solid, flickerless pinpricks of light that represent the further stars. Mid-year, he can sometimes see the golden sphere of Sol on the edge of the anti-polar sky, a reliquary of the now-abandoned Earth. But the sky right now is as cold as the air and as barren as a dune, studded with nothing but the pale husks of white dwarfs and haloed neutron stars. 

“I’m heading down,” he says, and with a flick of his fingers the ferrous nanoparticles flow out of his pod to support his feet. A sweep of his arms, and the villagers spread out in formation, vanishing into the night. His personal guard form a tight cluster at his back.

“Be careful,” he thinks he hears Temari say, as the nanoparticles lever him to the ground, but the wind steals the words from her mouth. Out of the corner of his eye, he spies her slinging the heavy body of her wind cannon to her shoulder. 

It doesn’t take long to reach Kankuro and the rest of his team of trap-makers. Moving quickly keeps the blood warm enough to stave off the worst of the nighttime chill, and Gaara knows every inch of the village’s surround as intimately as he knows the layout of the tunnels: every tripwire, every sand trap, every spike-filled pit to deter the unwary from stumbling across a tunnel entrance. 

“Report,” he huffs to Kankuro’s back, sheltered behind a stone outcropping. Despite the anonymity of their night suits, Kankuro is taller and broader than most Sunans, his body’s size ill-suited for the low tunnels in which they make their homes. Gaara could recognize him by his silhouette or his footfalls alone. 

“Looks like twelve people.” Kankuro lowers a slender spyglass from one goggled eye. “Headed this way. I think their ship’s disabled.”

“Armed?” 

“Hard to tell. They’re all carrying somethin’ for sure, but I can’t make it out yet.” The spyglass comes back up to Kankuro’s eye. His breath gets heavy in anticipation, the little pants of excitement that generally precipitate someone’s death. “In three … two … one.” 

A scream cuts through the wind and finds their ears. 

“Bingo. Sand pit,” Kankuro mutters. He raises his arm and the rest of the trap-makers fall into formation. “We’ll take care of it.”

“Wait.” Gaara stops him with a band of nanoparticles across the chest. “Let’s see what they want. They might be of some use to us.”

Disappointment radiates off Kankuro in waves. His shoulders slump. 

“Fine,” he grumbles. “But if they get mouthy, I’m gonna garrote them.” He holds up a fistful of waxed cord. “Been dying to try this out.”

Gaara rolls his eyes, even though he knows the effect is lost on his overeager brother. 

“Follow me.”

Their group crosses the dusty plain in a matter of minutes, moving swiftly on nigh-silent feet. Kankuro signals the edge of the pit, and they draw up short.

“Hello?” A voice carries up from the sand pit, the consonants thick and the vowels indistinct, blurring together. “Is someone up there? We could use some help down here.”

Gaara peers over the edge of the pit. One member of his guard raises a lantern, and a yellow glow parts the thick shadows to the bottom of the pit. Hunched in the bottom of the sandy basin are a dozen figures, suspiciously uninjured despite the distance of their fall. 

“The hell kinda accent is that?” Kankuro mutters in Gaara’s ear. “Never heard anything like it.”

Gaara shrugs it off, but Kankuro is right. The person speaking doesn’t use the harsh brogue of Iwa or the clipped syllables of Kiri. In fact, Gaara’s never heard such an accent in his life. Whoever these outsiders are, they must be from one of the further colonies.

“What do you want?” he calls down into the pit. “Why are you here?”

The bewildered mumbling that follows his inquiry carries even over the wind. The people in the pit shift uncertainly, and Gaara makes a quick assessment of them: eight men, four women, all swaddled in brightly colored clothing that exposes them on the planet’s surface as surely as if they were carrying neon floodlights. Their faces are exposed, their skin a dark, weather-beaten bronze that speaks to a much friendlier sun than the one on Kaze. Their eyes, uncovered, blink up in a staggering variety of colors, their dark pupils massively dilated in the lack of light, a sure indicator of off-planeters. If the dust doesn’t blind them, in a matter of hours, the fluid in their eyes will freeze and do the work for them. Even swaddled in thick clothing as they are, it’s clear to Gaara that if left here, they’ll die of exposure soon. The cold of Kaze’s nights is easy for outsiders to underestimate. 

Finally, one of them shoulders forward. His face is deeply scarred across both cheeks, as if some great beast grabbed him by the head and he only narrowly escaped. The cant of his shoulders speaks to Gaara of confidence. He must be their leader. He nods his head, and with a single gesture, all twelve of the people in the pit raise their hands over their heads. 

Clutched in each pair of filthy, ungloved fists is a white flag. 

The wind whistles through the pit and buffets each banner, the fabric snapping when it’s pulled taut. 

“We come in peace,” calls the man with the tripartite scars in his garbled accent. 

Behind Gaara’s shoulder, Kankuro lets out an airy guffaw. 

Gaara raises a magnetized glove, and the nanoparticles crawl down the pit wall to surround them. Black sand rolls over each pair of thin-soled shoes and up over the wrists of their outstretched hands. 

“Now, wait just a minute—!” the leader shouts, crumpling the white fabric in his fingers.

“Do you want to come up here, or do you want to die down there?” Gaara shouts down into the pit. 

Like the root system of a single fungus, all twenty-four arms go slack. Gaara lifts his hand, and the jumble of bodies rises from within the earth. A few of them stumble on solid ground. They may not yet be used to the planet’s gravity; it’s lower here than on most of the colony planets. 

Kankuro’s trap-setters surround the group, spears extended, forming a crown of thorns that forces them into tight formation. 

Gaara loosens the hold of his nanites, and the tallest of the group, whose eyes are the same black of Suna’s sunless sky, lurches forward. A trap-setter jabs at him with a spear to knock him backwards. 

There’s a hiss of hydraulics between two screaming gusts of wind, and the spear tip crushes in the man’s outstretched, defensive hand, crumpled to pieces like a dry leaf. The trap-setter startles, and the circle around the group of outsiders cinches tighter with a rattle of weapons. 

“We do not want to have to fight you—“ the tall man begins to protest. There are tears freezing in his long lower lashes, glittering in the torchlight. 

“—but we will if we have to,” another of the outsiders snarls. He bares his teeth to show off silver-capped fangs. He has the red clan tattoos and shaved teeth of a Kirian, but he’s too dark-featured to have grown up under the cloud cover of the Bloody Mist. Gaara wonders what made him abandon his clan and join this ragtag group of misfits. 

“There will be no fighting,” Gaara says, with a calm he doesn’t quite feel. These outsiders are dangerous. Stronger than they look, despite initial appearances. “This way. Stay close.”

  


* * *

  


At the entrance to the tunnels, Gaara demands they split up. 

“Your leader comes with me,” he says, keeping his words slow and careful. He speaks in International Common to ensure the outsiders understand him. “Take the rest to the quarantine room,” he murmurs to Kankuro. He gestures to the scarred man to follow him, summoning his nanites back to their pack. 

“Uh,” the outsiders' leader calls to Gaara’s back. “We’ve got sort of a … co-leadership arrangement, actually.” 

As Gaara watches, unblinking, a second man steps out from the back of the pack. He’s so nondescript Gaara hardly registered him. In a plain black, floor-length cloak and high boots, he’s the closest to appropriately dressed among all the outsiders. Then he blinks, and a tiny red light begins to flash within his right iris. He stares Gaara down and doesn’t say a word.

Two leaders is more than a little unorthodox. Gaara actually can’t fathom how such an arrangement might work—suppose the two of them disagreed, how then would the group decide what to do next?—but he has no idea what sort of cultural baggage the outsiders might be carrying with them, so he sets his concerns aside for now.

“Fine,” he says, “your leader _s_ come with me.” And he descends down the left-hand branch of the tunnel system to the council chambers. 

The outsiders hew closely to his back as he walks, conversing in hushed whispers in a language that Gaara doesn’t understand. The decision to lead them off alone was likely an unwise one—he’s outnumbered by them, now, and if they were to decide to attack at this moment, alone in the tunnel system, he’d be defenseless but for his nanites. But he has the advantage of knowing where they’re headed, and if he has to, he can run. Hopefully, not knowing when or if they’ll encounter the rest of Suna’s citizens will keep them cautious. 

Gaara pulls off his hood and shoves his goggles up to rest on the top of his head as he descends deeper into the belly of the tunnel system, and the geothermal heat begins working its way back into his bones. Behind him, the outsiders begin shedding their layers as well. He notices the left sleeve of the one with the false eye hangs empty—he’s missing an arm in addition to an eye. Gaara purses his lips. That will be a problem.

“Wow,” drawls the one with the scarred face, “so you guys _do_ have skin.” He speaks cautiously, stumbling over the conjugation of his verbs, but his tone is laden with a droll sarcasm. “I was worried for a minute that you were all robots or something.”

He moves a little closer, peering at Gaara through narrowed eyes, face altogether too close to Gaara’s own. “Awful pale, though. No chance to get much of a tan out here, huh?”

Gaara increases his pace, pulling away from the scrutiny of this odd man. 

“The sun on Kaze will kill you if you face it bare-skinned,” Gaara tells him as he slides open the door to the council chambers.

Word has spread fast through the tunnels, and Temari is already leaning against the far wall of the meeting room when the door opens, fingers clenched so tightly on her wind cannon that Gaara can see the blue pulse of the veins in her hand from the doorway. The remaining council members are gathered around the large, central table, all eyeing the interlopers with varying levels of suspicion and agitation. 

As the door shuts behind them, the outsiders' other leader, the tight-lipped one, mutters something that Gaara doesn’t understand. 

What he does understand, however, is the “Whoaaa,” that the scarred man utters. 

Gaara leaves them where they stand and stalks to his place at the table. He does not sit, but rather remains standing, gloved fingertips on his nanite pod as he allows the outsiders to make the first move. 

The scarred man bursts into animation almost immediately, sweeping his arms wide under his thick orange cloak and bowing deferentially to Temari.

“Honored leader,” he says, “thank you for granting us passage into your village. We come in peace.” 

Temari cuts her eyes at Gaara. Her nose wrinkles. 

“Who the fuck is this bozo?” she barks in Suna’s native tongue. “And why does he think I’m in charge here?” 

“H-hey, what did she just say?” the scarred man stutters out. 

Gaara finally takes his seat in the high-backed chair at the head of the table. Temari steps forward to stand at his shoulder, one hand on his chairback, the other on the sash that straps her wind cannon to her back. 

The outsiders’ scarfaced leader gawps. 

“Wait, _you’re_ the one in charge—?” he stammers. “But—but you’re so _young_ … and—and _short_!” 

The one-armed man whispers something in his ear in a language Gaara doesn’t recognize, pinching his companion on the back of his skinny arm, his face drawn with irritation. 

Councilwoman Chiyo clears her throat. 

“Let us all speak in the common tongue,” she says carefully and with substantial labor. It has been a great many years since any non-Sunan has actually breached the perimeter of the village and made it inside for negotiations. “So that we might discuss on equal terms.”

The two leaders jostle one another, childishly jockeying for position until they’re standing exactly abreast, shoulder to shoulder. Whatever the terms of their co-leadership, they seem not to be quite so firmly established as they would have had Gaara believe. It’s interesting to watch them, the way they push out and away from one another, like two magnets of the same pole. They mirror each other, but the reflection is inverted. They remind Gaara of nothing so much as his own planet: one side all heat and sun, the other all cold and night. 

“Where do you hail from?” Councilman Baki asks, his tone steady as the hollow reeds laid over a pit trap. 

“Earth,” says the louder of the two. 

There’s a wave of disgruntled muttering that carries across the council table like the shifting of a dune.

“Not your _clans_ ,” Gaara snaps, once the noise has died. “You. Where are _you_ from?” 

“Earth,” repeats the cold one, sounding the syllables out carefully. He turns to look at his companion as if not trusting that the other man correctly understood the question. “We’re from Earth.”

Gaara narrows his eyes. Behind him, Temari draws in an unsteady breath. Her fingers tighten, viselike, on his chairback. 

“So you’re … ?”

“That’s right!” the sunny one beams, throwing his hands around his waist in a sloppy bow. “Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke, at your service!” 

Of course, all of the colony planets have heard of the Konoha Twelve. The last dozen humans born on earth, thousands of years after most of the population fled the surface and established themselves among the outer reaches of space, as far as their primitive technology could travel. They were meant to be the saviors of a planet grown too toxic to sustain its native species. They had assumed the status of a myth grown from a rumor, whispered about over crackling communication channels and garbled by the babble of invaders. 

Gaara had judged them to be nothing more than a fairy tale. The sort of comforting story told to children who, despite being born in the colonies, longed to return to a home planet less hostile to their own biology. 

“What do you want from us?” Gaara asks, finally. There are a great many more questions scrabbling for purchase at the back of his tongue, but he doubts he has the common vocabulary to express them. 

“Safe harbor.” Uchiha finally speaks. His voice is smooth and nearly accentless, practiced and poised in comparison to his co-leader’s rough approximation of Common syllables. 

“From what?” Councilman Baki looks up from his folded hands, eyes narrowed. “We won’t put our village at risk.”

There’s a brief exchange of heated glances between the two leaders, a conversation in an unspoken tongue. Uzumaki sneers and lets out a growl, but Uchiha is the one who continues. 

“There are many among the colonies who wish to return to Earth,” he says, “and who want us as their guides. But we cannot—”

“We ain’t goin’ back there!” Uzumaki bursts in. 

“We are both unable and unwilling to go back to our home planet, but our ship is one of the few with the coordinates and landing instructions, and our crew among the few who have the skills to survive there.” 

It’s a fool’s errand, Gaara thinks, but nothing he wouldn’t put past the land-hungrier warlords of certain colonies. Everyone knows that humanity’s former home is barren, the only humans who still remain among its dwindling population elderly and disease-ridden, polluted by its damaged ecosystem and poisoned by Sol’s radiation, clinging precariously to the few scraps of land not overrun by natural disasters. And yet the conspiracy theories persist, as they always do—that the Earth was abandoned not for being uninhabitable, but because the _haves_ wished to drive out the _have-nots_ , keeping Earth’s once-legendary bounty for themselves. 

Even Gaara can admit that, were such a notion true, it would be an immense temptation. Ample resources, comfortable climate, space to stretch and sun to warm the skin and air to breathe easily. A life where every moment is not struggled for. Where every day does not bring newer, more harrowing decisions weighing the needs of the few against the survival of the many. 

“We’ve been given a mission,” Uchiha goes on. “One that requires us to establish ourselves on a colony planet.” 

“And what mission is that?” Councilman Ebizo grates out, thick brows heavy over his squinted eyes. 

“We’re going to repopulate the Earth!” Uzumaki extends a hand in a rather rude gesture, thumb turned out and pointing at the council members. From the grin on his face, it’s clear he has no idea that it’s his offense that has prompted the rumble of murmurs arising around the table. 

Uchiha slaps his arm down, glaring. Gaara doesn’t recognize the word he hisses next, but he suspects it to be some sort of curse, because Uzumaki’s features all scrunch to the center of his face.

“Sor-ry!” he whines, rubbing his arm. He sounds less like the leader of Earth’s last vestiges of humanity and more like a chastened child. 

“Childbearing on Earth is unsafe and unwise,” Uchiha goes on. “We need a place to live, so that our children or our children’s children may one day return, with the supplies and skills needed to restore the planet to its former state. So far, every colony we’ve attempted an arrangement with has been … inhospitable.” 

“So you guys are our last shot!” Uzumaki adds. 

Uchiha shoots him a look. 

“In exchange, we can offer you the contents of our ship’s computer. We know there was substantial knowledge lost in the exodus, and even more that has been lost to attrition since. There’s information in that computer that could make your lives much easier. Agriculture, medicine, science … it’s all in there. And it’s yours, in exchange for a home for us.”

“What’s to prevent us from killing you and just taking it?” Temari asks, cocking her hip to lean against the side of Gaara’s chair. “You’re completely at our mercy, here. We outnumber you.” 

Uzumaki leans forward. “Like we’d go down without a fight—!”

“A battle with us would not be without casualties,” Uchiha steps in, his long arm across Uzumaki’s chest as if to restrain him. “And even if you did succeed in killing us without decimating your own population, you wouldn’t have the correct access permissions. The ship’s computers are bio-locked.” 

Gaara scrutinizes them both placidly. Uzumaki shifts and fidgets under his stare, but Gaara isn’t truly looking at him. He’s thinking of the vellum-thin pages of the books on his desk, their water-warped covers and their crumpled illustrations. The faded, brown-edged labels of the seeds in the deepest reaches of the bank, their instruction cards in languages that he cannot decipher, which number too few to experiment with. 

“We can’t accommodate the defective one.” He indicates Uchiha’s limp sleeve. “We only have use for those who are whole and functional. We won’t burden ourselves with him.”

Uzumaki’s cheeks go florid under his scars, leaving pale silver stripes across his reddened cheeks. 

“Whaddya mean, defective?” he shouts. “Who the hell are you to call him _defective_?” 

Gaara doesn’t rise to the bait, just gestures with a nod of his head to the absence where the outsider’s arm should be. 

“If you’re gonna put him out over that, you’re gonna have to put me out, too!” 

Uzumaki reaches up his right sleeve. 

Immediately, all the council have their weapons drawn and pointed at him. Gaara’s nanites fly out from the charging pod on his back and form a shield across the front of the table. 

“Think very carefully,” Temari grits through clenched teeth, ”about what you do next.” Her finger twitches on the trigger of her wind cannon. 

There’s a click, and every muscle in the room tenses. 

Uzumaki’s arm falls from his sleeve and hits the floor with a _clang._

“Like I said,” he growls, “if he’s _defective_ , then I’m defective, too. Shit, half our crew is defective by your standards.”

Gaara flicks his fingers, and the nanites return to their pod. He raises a stilling hand, and the council’s grip on their weapons slackens, but only slightly. 

“Very well,” he says flatly. “Whichever of you are … unafflicted, we can accommodate. The rest will need to leave.”

“Yeah, that ain’t gonna fly.” Uzumaki stoops to pick up his arm from the floor and cradles it over his shoulder, like a mother carrying her child. “We’re not splitting up.”

“Then leave,” Gaara offers, “all of you. Suna is a tightly regulated village with limited resources. Every person needs to be able to contribute just as much as they consume. I won’t jeopardize our self-sufficiency for a group of outsiders with only three working limbs apiece.”

Suna is a village locked in stasis, its survival a carefully oiled machine that hinges upon the principles of balance and self-sufficiency. It produces exactly as much as is needed for the livelihoods of the villagers, with neither space nor cause for any surplus. Each villager is expected to attend to their own needs, and to contribute their skills to the village to the sacrifice of their wants. The number of children is carefully regulated, as is the number of elders, keeping the village just on the precipice of a minimally viable population—enough to sustain, enough to not die out, but never enough to grow. 

Uzumaki splutters, his lone working fist tensing. The metal of his artificial arm creaks under his grip, and the flat of the forearm reacts instantaneously, bristling up into an array of tiny, bladed spikes. Gaara raises an eyebrow—an interesting development—but the outsider leader doesn’t seem to notice, even as his glove stains red with blood. 

“What would we need to give you,” Uchiha says coolly, “for all twelve of us to stay?”

Temari leans forward and whispers in Gaara’s ear. He arcs an eyebrow. 

“The ship.”

“No way!” Uzumaki shouts. “So you can load up and fly off and abandon us here in this—this … _wasteland?_ Nuh-uh, no sir, not happening.” He shakes his head so hard that his scarf slips from his shoulders. He’s coming apart at the seams right in front of them. It’s not exactly a powerful negotiating position. 

Gaara scoffs. “Don’t be ridiculous. My people won’t all fit on your ship. There are over 300 of us.”

He waits while Uzumaki works up a consternated scowl. He’s terribly expressive, his heart all over his face. It makes it easy to predict him … and to stay one step ahead of the slow and visible turning of the gears in his mind. 

“Then what the hell d’ya even want it for?”

“The metal.”

The interior of the planet Kaze contains no ore, no veins of precious metal to be mined or harvested. What little remains was brought from off-planet, recycled to the point of brittleness or disuse, and the only source of fresh metal was the occasional incursions of hastily-dispatched enemies, their corpses stripped of their weaponry and jewelry. Or the rare pieces of space junk that tore through the planet’s thin atmosphere to crater the surface, humanity’s detritus. Even Gaara’s ferrous nanoparticles, the core feature of his defense and mobility, are an heirloom, passed down from his mother and completely irreplaceable. 

And metal is a necessity for life on Kaze, its rarity a strain on the colony’s scope and sustenance. Almost everything that would have been made from metal on Earth can be replaced by stone or fabric or glass, but electricity cannot. And electricity is Suna’s lifeblood—the planet’s sun is too harsh for humans or plantlife to survive, and so their precious, life-giving Vitamin D and the photosynthesis of their crops rely solely on supplementation and artificial light sources. Neither man nor plant can survive without sunlight, and in Suna, the sun’s pale imitation is harnessed primarily by copper wire. 

Metal, in Suna, is even more precious than the water hauled down from the polar ice caps or the food grown from the Seed Bank.

“You’re gonna tear up _my ship?!_ No, fuck that—“

Despite Uzumaki’s definitively erratic nature, it’s actually Uchiha who’s the wild card. He’s as stone-faced as Gaara; a perfect, placid mirror when he says, “Fine. Deal.”

Gaara inclines his head in acceptance. “How many of your party are defective?”

“Uh, well … “ Uzumaki holds up his detached arm in front of him and begins comically manipulating the fingers, counting aloud. He reminds Gaara of Kankuro as a child, playing with his toy marionettes. “There’s us two … the twins both have their eye thing, um … Lee—that’s the guy who ratfucked your guard’s spear—” Uzumaki breaks off to chuckle ruefully. “—he’s, like, more robot than person at this point. Ino’s got her little brain implant thingy… “

“That’s an enhancement,” Uchiha corrects him. “There are five, total, if I’ve understood your definition correctly.”

Gaara closes his eyes to perform a quick mental calculus.

“Is that all?” Uchiha presses impatiently. “Are we settled on the terms of our agreement? Our shelter in exchange for our ship?”

“Five defective individuals represents a substantial burden,” Ebizo mutters.

“I can do anything a guy with two arms can do, and probably better!” Uzumaki protests. “Sasuke, too,” he adds as an afterthought. 

“No,” Gaara interrupts the upswing of his rant. “The ship won’t suffice. Your arm, where did it come from? Earth?”

“Huh?” Uzumaki holds up the arm, its fingers dangling limp, clanking as they strike each other in the wake of being shaken. “This thing? Nah, that was all Sakura’s work.”

“Our surgeon, Haruno Sakura,” Uchiha clarifies. “She’s trained in emergency medicine and prosthetics. A medical genius.” 

“Why didn’t she make one for you?”

“Hey!” Uzumaki shouts. “That’s none of your business! What Sasuke decides to do with his body is up to him!”

Uchiha’s gaze shifts. 

“It was a personal decision.”

Clearly a sensitive topic, then. Gaara lets the matter drop, though he cannot fathom why someone with access to such medical technology would choose to remain in that state. Uzumaki’s protests aside, surely Uchiha struggles to manage with just a single arm. And he cannot possibly be as principled as his defiant posture and stare would suggest; after all, he clearly had no qualms replacing one of his eyes. Its red light blinks at Gaara even now, steady in his baleful gaze.

“Your surgeon will work with our medical team.” Gaara nods to Councilwoman Chiyo. “And teach us how to make those.” 

“Construction of prostheses requires a great deal of specialized equipment,” Uchiha says. “I’m not sure how useful the abstract knowledge will be.” 

“Suna has long had to survive in adverse conditions. We’re nothing if not adaptable.” Gaara’s eyes flick to the nodding Council members, then back over the two men from Earth. “Anything we don’t have, we can make. From your ship.”

Uzumaki groans. 

“Fine,” he relents. “It’s a deal.” 

He jams his false arm back into its socket and extends it over the Council table. 

Gaara stares at it for a long moment, failing to understand, until Uzumaki seizes his hand and shakes it vigorously.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was inspired by the [Pavlovsk Experimental Station seed bank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlovsk_Experimental_Station) and the concept of [r-selection and K-selection species](http://www.bio.miami.edu/tom/courses/bil160/bil160goods/16_rKselection.html), and as a result, evolutionary timeframes are played fast and loose. Suna’s atmospheric and weather conditions are loosely based on the [planet Mercury](https://www.space.com/28356-how-to-live-on-mercury.html). Information about living conditions underground were taken from [this Popular Science article,](https://www.popsci.com/humans-survive-underground/) and some of the societal structure was derived from the notion of [Minimum Viable Population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population). Title is from [_When the War Came_ by the Decemberists](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJHOiQ2uniU). Thank you to [tendertorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tendertorn) for the initial concepts for this story. 
> 
> Come chat with me on Tumblr [@ghoste-catte](https://ghoste-catte.tumblr.com)!


	2. Parallel Worlds

“I need you to check the manifest,” Gaara dictates over his shoulder to Temari as she follows him down the tunnel to the medical suite. Uzumaki and Uchiha are following them, so he slips into Sunan. Although in reality, he has no idea if the outsiders can understand Sunan at all. Uzumaki certainly put on a show of bewilderment earlier, but Uchiha is an unknown quantity. “Try to find twelve separate households that can accommodate a spare bed, once the outsiders are out of quarantine—families who were preparing for children or who just had an elder go walking.”

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Temari’s fingers drum a nervous tattoo on her wind cannon. 

“I’d rather not house them together, if we can prevent it. They’ll assimilate better if they’re split up. They need to get a sense for how things are done here.” 

“That’s not what I meant,” Temari replies. “I mean … is _all this_ a good idea?” She gestures broadly over her shoulder at the two men following them. 

“That amount of metal is an unexpected boon,” Gaara reminds her.

“But we could get the metal ourselves. We don’t need their assistance for that. All the rest is … secondary.”

Gaara thins his lips. 

“I made a promise,” he says. “I won’t go back on my word now.” 

Temari’s lip twitches with the hint of a sneer, but nonetheless she pulls out her ring of tempered glass keys and unlocks the door to the quarantine room. 

The tiny room is a bricolage of color and noise. The outsiders have shed their cloaks and outerwear like the fallen leaves of so many deciduous trees, and the clothing they wear underneath is yet more colorful, bright and boisterous and utterly un-Sunan. There’s scarcely enough space in the little quarantine room for them all to stand, much less lay down comfortably. They’re packed in, three to a cot, but their comfort with the enforced touch is jarring in its foreignness. 

They all turn as one at the hiss of the doors. 

The two sitting on the closest bed are nearly identical in appearance, distinct only by the length of their dark hair. They blink simultaneously, then squint flat eyes of such a pale blue they’re nearly violet. They must be the twins that were mentioned before. Gaara wonders how much of the scene they can actually see. 

He can sense Temari at his shoulder bristling, stiffening. Questioning once more the increasingly apparent faults of his judgment. 

“So?” pipes up a slight woman lounging across two of her compatriots on a cot. The elaborate heap of her hair is tangled with so much ornate decoration that the brown is nearly gold with it. Gold is among the most useless of the metals, but Gaara still does not see her keeping such impractical ornamentation for long. Not down here in the tunnels. “What’s the—?” She falters, and then pronounces a word Gaara cannot understand, the tone raised at the end as if in question. 

“Verdict,” chimes in the man who had been supporting her head. Gaara recognizes him immediately—the man who ruined the trap setter’s weapon with just his artificial hand. His height is apparent even sitting down; he’s easily taller than even Kankuro. His features are all very close-set, his brow heavy and stern. If Gaara weren’t confident in the speed of his nanites and Temari’s skill with her wind cannon, he might almost be intimidated. 

Uzumaki throws his arms wide and exclaims something in their strange, melodic Earth language.

“We can stay!” he repeats in International Common, solely for Gaara and Temari’s benefit. 

The room goes wild with claps and cheers and shouting. A heavyset man begins banging on one of the cot legs rhythmically, and several others begin singing. A song of celebration, Gaara hopes, rather than one of war. 

Regardless, it’s sure to be heard down the corridors and attract attention. And excessive noise can destabilize the delicate structures that hold the tunnel walls up, so Gaara raises a steadying hand and clears his throat. 

“You’ll remain here until you’re medically cleared,” he enunciates carefully. 

Suna’s tunnels are so heavily interconnected, and the community so close-knit that any exogenous infection has the potential to run roughshod over the populace. Even a foreign cold could decimate their ranks. And Suna’s medical equipment is truly only equipped to handle familiar, short-term illnesses. Gaara has no way of knowing what sorts of microbes these outsiders might be carrying in their hair or skin, what bacteria or virii are even now floating through the room on their breath. 

“We’ll have some more cots brought in so you can sleep.” He glances to Temari, who nods as she adds it to her mental list of tasks related to the outsiders’ acclimation. 

“How long do you think it will be?” A lithe woman sits up straight, her eyes keenly narrowed. Her head is closely shaven, save for a shock of bright pink hair that falls just short of her eyes. 

“Two weeks is standard, but it will depend on what Councilwoman Chiyo says. She’ll be in to inspect you shortly.”

The woman sits back with a nod and a crossing of her arms, clearly satisfied. 

“All that is expected of you right now is to wait,” Gaara adds. 

Uzumaki kisses his teeth, already clambering into the thin space on a cot left between the heavyset man and his more limber, goateed companion. 

“Ugh,” he groans. “I hate waiting.”

“You’ll live,” replies Uchiha, foregoing the cots to stand against the far wall. He jams his hand in the pocket of the trailing cloak he has yet to shed. 

“Unless you have some fatal disease you haven’t disclosed to us,” Temari adds in faltering Common. She has never been particularly interested in the language or her studies generally, fiercely loyal to Suna and protectionist to a fault. Still, even with her clunky syntax, her words are as sharply bladed as ever. 

The man with the goatee stifles a guffaw. Temari’s eyes snap to him.

“Something funny about my voice?” she says between gritted teeth.

If he’s making fun of her, it’s a grave mistake. Temari isn’t sensitive about much, but a jibe about her vocal register has the potential to throw her into a rage. 

The man throws his hands up. “No, no.” His speech is as smooth and unaccented as Uchiha’s, hampered only by a slightly lazy drawl of his vowels. His face, like Uzumaki’s, is unnaturally scarred, the even thickness and length of the two dark stripes spanning the side of his face revealing them as ritualistic. “I was laughing at your joke.” 

“I wasn’t joking,” Temari snipes back. 

The man inclines his head. “In that case, forgive me, my lady.” In his slow speech, the words can’t help but sound sarcastic. 

“Who do you think you’re calling _yours?_ ” Temari sneers. 

“Temari.” Gaara raises his hand as if to touch her, centimeters above her arm. “Let’s not keep the medical staff waiting.”

“Right.” Temari turns with a huff. 

“See ya around, Temari,” the goateed man calls, rolling the _r_ perfectly. He flicks his hand to his forehead lazily. Gaara only knows the gesture to be one of respect from the manual on ancient Earth military structure on his desk. 

Out in the hallway, Temari fumes. It’s only a brief walk from the quarantine room to the medical unit proper, but she spends the entire duration ranting under her breath. 

“Where does he get off talking to me like that? _My lady_ , like he owns me. You know, Gaara, if you weren’t so damn _principled_ , I’d have half a mind to—”

They pause at the door to wash their hands, then rinse their mouths. 

“It’s a term of honor,” Gaara says, wiping the water from his chin.

“What?” 

“My lady. He’s not claiming ownership of you. He thinks you’re royalty.” 

Gaara is so preoccupied bracing himself for the sting of the antibiotic injections—it was foolhardy to spend so much time in close quarters with the outsiders, not knowing what they might have carried, and now the whole Council would be paying the price in precious preventative medicine—that he hardly registers how quickly Temari’s pale cheeks flush a brilliant pink.

The color is flooding up to the tips of her ears as she mutters, “Well, I don’t know why he’d think a stupid thing like that.”

  


* * *

  


“So, there’s an issue with the manifest.” 

The door to Gaara’s room opens without preamble. He knows without glancing up from his desk that the interloper must be Temari or Kankuro or both. No one else would attempt to enter his private space without announcing themselves and seeking his permission. 

The weight of the footfalls and the size of the hand that lays the folder on his desk reveal the speaker as Kankuro. 

“What seems to be the problem?” He meets his brother’s eyes. “Also, I thought I had assigned that task to Temari.”

“Yeah, well.” Kankuro hops up on the surface of the desk to sit, his legs dangling in the air. “She’s busy scrambling a team to go retrieve the ship parts. Lots of heavy labor and not a lot of people who can take time away from their other jobs to do it.” 

“Have the outsiders do it once they’re out of quarantine.” Gaara picks up the folder and opens it, but Kankuro’s untidy scrawl spiderwebs all over the tunnel map, scratched out and rewritten over dozens of times in all variety of colors. “Consider it their induction to Sunan culture. The sooner they learn the expectations of contribution, the better. Besides, we’ll need someone familiar with the ship if we don’t want to damage the computer system when we take it apart.” 

“Damn!” Kankuro throws his head back on the exclamation. “I knew there was a reason they put you in charge!” 

Gaara doesn’t roll his eyes at his brother’s theatrics, but it’s a near thing. 

“And the manifest?” 

“Right, yeah.” Kankuro straightens, snatching the folder with the document from Gaara’s hands. “So I’ve looked at this damn thing … I don’t know, as many ways as I can think of to look at it. Until my eyes crossed, basically. And every. Single. Time. I come up with eleven spare beds. I know you didn’t want them to double up, but even putting two of them in a room together, or moving some families _out_ of their homes to move the outsiders in … “ He ruffles the papers. “Eleven. There’s room for eleven of them.”

He lays out several copies of the map on the desk, spreading them with his fingers. 

“Reckon we can put one of ‘em out?”

Gaara shakes his head. 

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and one of ‘em’ll die in quarantine,” Kankuro suggests with a wry twist of his lips.

“Your humor astounds as always.” Gaara trails his fingers along the sketchy lines of the blueprints, bending close to better read Kankuro’s chicken scratch. 

“I’m only halfway joking.”

“Kankuro—” Gaara pauses, sitting up to meet his brother’s pale eyes. “Why is my room crossed out on all of these?” 

Kankuro huffs, crossing his arms. “‘Cause I’m not a dipshit, that’s why. We can’t shack you up with some _stranger_. What if your new roomie gets a wild hare and decides to off you in the middle of the night?” 

“Then I’d defend myself.” Gaara collates all the papers into a pile, returning them to their folder. “I’m not nearly as fragile as you like to think.” 

“I know, dude, but after—” Kankuro falls silent. 

Gaara knows what is about to be said, and so there is no need for his brother to say it. Gaara’s _life_ , such as it is, remains a sore topic. 

“Put one of them in here,” he says, in a tone that brooks no argument. 

“But they’ve got all kinds of crazy weapons on ‘em!” Kankuro, predictably, insists on debating regardless. “Hell, some of 'em _are_ weapons. And they’re big ol’ fellas, too. Bodyweight means an awful lot in a fight, y'know.” 

Kankuro’s argumentative nature is among the primary reasons why he does not have a seat on the Council, although his status could easily have afforded him such. Well, that and his absolute loathing for any meeting longer than five minutes. And his nigh obsessive interest in his defense work. He’s taught himself how to navigate his tools by feel, so that he doesn’t have to stop working after lights-out. 

But Kankuro’s defiance bothers Gaara not at all. The devil’s advocate makes for a fine personal advisor. 

“I have plenty of space for a spare cot,” Gaara insists.

The place Gaara calls his _room_ technically isn’t. He sleeps and works and passes almost all the time that isn’t spent in the Seed Bank there, sure, but it’s not the space that he’s assigned to stay. Suna’s households tend to be intergenerational: grandparents, parents, and children all sleeping in a single room. A Sunan only leaves their family home once married, and even then only if there is sufficient vacancy for the new couple to establish an independent household. So Gaara’s rightful bed is with Temari and Kankuro, tucked into a cozy little corner of the tunnels far from the bustle of the main routes. Or … at least it _was_ , Gaara supposes, since Kankuro has certainly allocated the spare bed to one of the outsiders. 

The space where Gaara actually sleeps—the room that he and Kankuro are in now—is labeled on the map as a workspace. It contains all the materials that were once their father’s, and his father's father's, and his father's grandfather's before him, all the way back to the original ship captain who founded the village. It is, of course, not the same physical _space_ in which their father once worked—the colony has relocated within the tunnels several times even since Gaara’s ascension—but his presence is still felt here.

Rasa lingers like an unwelcome ghost in the corners, his scrawl in the margins of the most recent transcriptions of the books, marks left by his dirty fingers on the labels of the soil samples. The room is frigid with it, hallowed like a barrow. Temari calls Gaara _morbid_ for choosing to spend his time here. But Gaara has grown to appreciate the gloom, wears its weight like a millstone around his neck. 

Kankuro purses his lips, his exhale accompanied by a terribly rude sound effect.

“Fine. You got a preference for your new roommate?” He takes the sheaf of papers when Gaara shoves it at him. “Maybe one of the leaders? So if they try to off ours, you can at least have a shot at taking out one of theirs?” 

Gaara considers it briefly, thinking of Uzumaki’s brash rancor, Uchiha’s cold indifference. 

“No.” The notion is simply intolerable.

“What about the doctor chick? She’s a looker, ain’t she? In a scary way, I mean.” 

Gaara has no interest in the attractiveness of the outsiders’ physician. Kankuro should know very well that at his age, if Gaara intended to contribute to the replacement rate of the village, he would have already. 

“No.” 

“Or maybe one of the ones with the freaky eyes? You could definitely get the jump on one’a them if you needed to—”

“No.”

Gaara closes his eyes, running down the list of the outsiders in his mind. Temari had worked up a rather thorough report of their essential information: special skills, expected contributions, any medical liabilities. His thoughts screech to a halt at the memory of a piercing pair of dark eyes, a heavy, furrowed brow. A hand outstretched, shattering a spearpoint as if it were nothing. 

“The one with the false arm and leg,” he says, his mind skipping over the unfamiliar syllables of the man’s strange name. “The one they said was more robot than man.” 

Kankuro flips through the papers rapidly. 

“Rock Lee?” he pronounces with some labor. “Are you sure?” 

“Yes,” Gaara confirms, returning his attention to the inventory he was reviewing before he was interrupted. Something shifts in his chest, tingling like the air between his gloved fingers as he summons up his nanites. Curiosity, perhaps. Intrigue. Something a little like the thrill of fear. 

“Now, if there’s nothing else, I have work to do.”

  


* * *

  


The knocking at Gaara’s chamber door startles him. 

He’s cautious as he approaches, gloved hand lingering on the pod at his hip. The volume and cadence don’t sound like anyone who frequents this part of the tunnels—aides or guards or friends. 

“Who is it?” he calls, mouth pressed to the seam. 

“Um.” The reply is far too loud, and the words that follow are in International Common, not the Sunan Gaara just spoke. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that? Am I in the right place?” 

Gaara eases the door open. On the other side stoops a man far too tall for the low ceilings of the tunnels, a pack at his side and his dark features crumpled with worry. 

Gaara had nearly forgotten today was the last day of the outsiders’ quarantine. It’s nearing harvest time for most of the tubers, and the work in the gardens has been unceasing. 

“Rock,” he says, glancing behind him at the hastily installed cot that has already become storage space for his varied and sundry books and scrolls. It had quite slipped his mind to tidy it. “Welcome. Please, come in.” 

“You can call me Lee,” the man replies, ducking his head to cross through the low doorway. “All my friends do.” 

It’s fortunate that the ceilings of Gaara’s room are slightly higher than most other rooms in the village, save for the kitchens and the gardens, which are carved tall to provide additional ventilation. Even with the slight arch, the man’s shiny hair very nearly touches the ceiling. 

“Lee, then.” Gaara’s tongue stumbles on the unruly consonant. “I apologize for the mess.” 

He quickly sweeps all the scattered paper off the spare cot and dumps it unceremoniously upon the desk. He can organize it all later. 

“Please, don’t apologize!” The man’s voice is surprisingly high for someone with such a large frame. “I’m the one intruding. Thank you for your hospitality.” 

“I’m Gaara, by the way.” 

“The guard who walked me down here told me so much about you!” Lee beams. From his enthusiasm, Gaara is immediately suspicious that it was one of his siblings who escorted the outsider to his rooms … only to vanish, leaving Gaara in the lurch. “I’m so very honored that you’ve allowed me to stay with you.” He sets his pack on the ground beside the cot and stands to his full height. “Oh, but I’m being rude! Pleased to make your acquaintance.” 

He extends his hand. Beneath the overhead lights, its nature is obvious, the individual articulation of each metal joint clearly artificial despite the coating of flesh-colored paint. 

It’s only because of Uzumaki’s earlier overtures that Gaara knows how to respond. He reaches out for his hand to be gripped in Lee’s long fingers, bracing for the contact. 

When they shake, he hears the hiss and creak of hydraulics in Lee’s wrist. 

It doesn’t take long to unpack Lee’s scant belongings. There clearly wasn’t room on their tiny ship for much. He has a few more sets of clothing, all in the hypersaturated tones that seem to characterize the outsider’s garb, fabric in greens more intense than the fiddleheads of ferns, woven with oranges brighter than calendula petals. A small set of iron weights and rubber stretching bands that remind Gaara of the equipment used for injury rehabilitation in the medical clinic. A crumpled, glossy paper that Lee shoves into the pack’s front pocket as soon as it’s unearthed. 

“Is there an outlet somewhere?” Lee holds up something black and bulky, dangling with wires. “I need to charge my batteries every so often.” He shows the palm of his metal hand, and a plate slides back to reveal a port there. 

“By the desk.” Gaara gestures to it—it’s the same place he charges his nanite pod—and Lee very gingerly moves a few of the books aside to plug the contraption in.

Afterwards, he sits on the edge of the cot, staring Gaara down with those dark, dark eyes. Gaara has never seen anything like them, even among the few off-planeters who have dared stray to Kaze’s surface. They’re nearly black, the same sheen of the backs of the beetles that pollinate the spicebush blossoms. His skin—like that of all of the outsiders—is a much darker brown than any denizen of Suna, evidence of life under the harsh rays of Sol. It’s slightly eerie, watching him move without being able to see the blue lifeblood of his veins. 

Lee’s posture is perfectly upright even as his knees are forced into awkward angles by the short legs of the cot, prim as a schoolboy waiting for instruction. It’s impossible not to stare, so Gaara doesn’t try. His eyes are drawn to Lee’s defects like tin snips to a magnet, locked on his artificial limbs. Though he’s wearing long trousers, Gaara heard the squeak of his hip joint when he sat, hears now the hydraulic hiss of the knee decompressing. But he’d moved just as well as a person with all four limbs intact, as he’d shuffled around the room unpacking. Uncanny.

“So, um, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Lee says slowly. His Common vocabulary is very robust, but he speaks the language like a student’s primer, in a register of hyper-formal, distant politeness. “I tried to ask the medical staff, but they weren’t especially chatty …” 

The medics would have been in and out of the quarantine room quickly, heavily scrubbed and masked in an effort to reduce any possible exposure. They should only have returned to deliver the outsiders’ meals, after the initial tests were complete. It’s no surprise that they didn’t stick around for conversation. 

“Is … everything around here on timers? I noticed the lights go off and on at the same time every day.” 

Gaara levels him with a scrutinizing look. He’s across the room from Lee now, standing by the desk with a book in his hand, as though to feign reorganizing their disarray. 

“It’s seasonal,” he replies. “Coupled to the needs of the crops.”

“You grow plants here?” Lee’s eyes blow very wide, his mouth a tiny _o_ of surprise. “Underground?”

Gaara pauses in the sorting of his books. 

“You didn’t know?”

Lee shakes his head. “But … how?” 

Gaara studies him for a moment before he sits in the desk’s single chair. He can’t tell if he’s being probed for information about the Seed Bank, or if Lee is truly that ignorant. Had the Konoha Twelve really thrown themselves upon the mercy of Suna knowing nothing of its provenance, unaware of the secret treasure contained within its walls? Gaara’s instinct is to paranoia, but there’s something about the openness on Lee’s face, a certain innocence. Naive, but not quite. Perhaps the best word for it is _trustworthy_. 

“It’s designed for maximum energy conservation,” Gaara explains. “Timing the electrical system and climate control to the plants’ needs reduces the energy burden of individual circuits. And it allows us to sync our circadian rhythms to the harvest cycle and the gardens’ growth needs. We’re awake while the plants are growing, and we sleep when they’re dormant. We have all they need down here: light, an irrigation system, a few small colonies of symbiotic pollinators.” 

“Insects?” Lee leans forward. 

Gaara nods. “Beetles, wasps, a few others. Nothing that can’t be sustained without a predator presence.” 

“Shino will be so excited!” 

“Oh?” Gaara cocks his head. 

“He _loves_ bugs!” Lee enthuses. “He’s been studying them since he was a little boy.” 

That, Gaara notes, had not been in Temari’s dossier. It seems living with one of the outsiders will impart a wealth of knowledge he otherwise might not have accessed. Certainly tongues are often looser in conversation than in interrogation. 

Lee’s expressive face goes suddenly somber. Despite the oddness of his features, his emotions are an open book. And Gaara's lifeblood rests in words upon paper.

“Of course, there weren’t many of them on Earth. Not by the time we left, anyway.” The smile Lee wears then is small, sad. “He’ll be thrilled.” 

The comment piques Gaara’s curiosity. The elimination of a habitat’s insect population is often its death knell. Insects are at once the most sensitive to environmental hardship and the most resilient. So perhaps the outsiders’ knowledge and competencies were not oversold; there is information to be mined here. He crosses his legs, ankle over knee, getting himself comfortable.

“Is that why you fled?” he asks, lowering his voice. “Earth? Is it worse than we’ve heard?” 

“I don’t know what you’ve heard. Every colony seems to have different rumors.” Lee’s tone drops in turn, but it remains much too loud for their close quarters. “I only know what I lived.” There’s a pause where Lee chews his bottom lip. The skin of it is badly chapped. He adds hastily, “We didn’t _flee_ , though.”

“No?”

“We were forced to leave.” 

Gaara stills, waiting for Lee to continue. It’s a long moment before he accepts the invitation of Gaara’s watchful silence.

“We’re … the last generation,” Lee says, choosing his words with painful awkwardness. “I’m sure you’ve heard that much. That we’re the last humans that were born on Earth.” 

Gaara nods his acknowledgement. 

“No one who grew up on Earth can bear children naturally anymore, of course. So our parents weren’t really our _parents_. They were chosen to raise us based on their skills and talents. It was a huge honor, really! That’s why my papa—”

Lee cuts off, then blinks several times rapidly.

“Sorry. I don’t mean to let my emotions get the best of me. Um, our parents—not the genetic donors, but the people who raised us—were supposed to teach us whatever they knew, so we could pass it on to our own children.” 

Lee looks down and away, his fingers fidgeting, the true ones and the false ones, letting out little creaks as the oiled joints flex. He looks almost ashamed. 

“We were … grown, rather than born. Bred. The goal was to produce a crop of resilient, fertile offspring, ones who were resistant to Earth’s radiation. Who could bear natural children and restore the human population over time. We’re basically an experiment in genetics.” 

“And did the _experiment_ succeed?” Gaara barely keeps the disgust from his voice. 

He can’t help but be taken aback. Suna genetically modifies the seeds in the gardens, of course, through careful cross-breeding, modifying pollination patterns, and carefully choosing which cultivars are placed proximate for maximal production. But the notion of doing something like that to _people_ , selecting their traits as if they were pea plants … it’s barbaric. 

Lee hesitates. There are tears clustering in the corners of his eyes, silvery and reflective. 

“Yes and no,” he says, after a long, painful moment where his breathing hitches and tightens. “We … should be able to have children. All the medical tests say so, even if none of us have managed to yet. But they underestimated the severity of the radiation. No matter how much they tried to shield us from it …” 

He trails off. A tear sneaks down his face. Gaara fumbles in his desk drawer, passes him a handkerchief. The frank expression of emotion is distinctly uncomfortable, and yet there's something in Gaara that wants to _comfort_ this strange man. Despite his augmentations, Lee is much more human than he is machine. 

“We probably got the best medical care of any person on Earth,” Lee says, dabbing at his eyes. “It was unfair, really. There were people who needed it more. All told, we’re a pretty healthy bunch. But every time we went in for a check-up, the numbers were worse.”

“Numbers?” 

“Um.” Lee shifts on the cot’s mattress, and its wooden frame complains beneath him. Gaara is surprised to see the hint of a blush emerging on Lee’s sun-browned cheeks. “Our, uh … fertility rate? There were fewer healthy, um. Gametes. In our … genetic material.” 

“I understand,” Gaara interjects, before Lee’s metal fingers can pick a hole right through the mattress’ batting. 

Lee shoots him a relieved smile. 

“So, the only choice was to leave. To go off-planet to one of the colonies, start up our families, and return to Earth … eventually.”

“Won’t that present the same problem?” Gaara frowns at the man fidgeting across from him. It’s a question he hadn’t thought to ask Uchiha, a hole in their logic that he now can’t help but probe. “If the earth is still irradiated, won’t that cause issues for your children and grandchildren?” 

“They’re supposed to be working on it, back home.” Lee bites his lip again. His teeth are slightly uneven, discolored from what Gaara now recognizes as inadequate childhood nutrition and poorly filtered water. “They’re building better radiation shielding. Maybe something like what you all have here.” He gestures expansively, encompassing the whole room and the tunnel system beyond. 

“You know, years ago there were whole populations underground on Earth?” Lee asks, glancing up. His eyelashes are very long and very dark, clumped together by his tears. “Living in … nuclear bunkers, that’s what they called them. It was mostly wealthy people and politicians and a handful of … well, loonies. But they weren’t designed to be used long-term, and the people who lived there for too many years got really sick. Because there was no sunshine. That’s what they told us at least.”

Gaara nods quickly. “Vitamin D from the sun is an essential component of human life.” 

There’s a silence where Lee studies him, where Gaara is starkly aware of the differences between them. Thousands of years in the belly of Kaze have changed the Sunan people. Gaara sees himself as if through Lee’s eyes—the translucence of his sunless skin, the swollen pupils of his pale eyes that allow navigation in the dark tunnels, the subtle changes in the musculature of arms that see more work than legs, the slightness of his stature and compactness of his body. He can almost see the question pressing at Lee’s lips: _Are you even human anymore?_ It is not the first time an outsider has asked such things, though the adaptations of the Kirians and Iwans to their respective planets are no less extreme. 

“But you all get by fine down here?” Lee asks instead. “Even though you can’t go out in the sun? Naruto said the sun here will kill you.” 

“It will,” Gaara confirms. “The atmosphere is too thin. But our lights mimic the Earth’s sun almost exactly. Anything additional we can supplement with enriched food or with vitamin tablets.” 

“I don’t have a mind for science, really,” Lee says, a crooked little smile working at the corner of his lips. “But maybe you all could help. Teach—well, not me, I’d be useless, but Shikamaru, maybe?—how you do it, so we can take it back to Earth one day.”

Gaara looks askance. Much of Suna’s infrastructure is proprietary, carefully developed through years of trial and error, ferociously guarded. And its success is largely reliant on the genetic diversity of the Seed Bank, whose secrets are not so easily shared. 

“Perhaps,” he demurs. “If such an exchange of information proves mutually beneficial.”

A grin spreads across Lee’s face by degrees. 

“You know, you’re much nicer than the rumors say.” 

“Oh?” 

“All the other colonies talked about how fierce and wicked Suna’s villagers were. That you all killed outsiders without even thinking about it.”

Gaara says nothing. The legacy of his father looms like a long shadow even now.

“We almost didn’t come here at all,” Lee says. “But we didn’t have any other choice. We tried all four of the other colony planets first, but they always wanted … things. Things we couldn’t give them.”

“Returning to Earth,” Gaara confirms. 

“That, too. I guess Naruto and Sasuke already told you that much. We almost thought we’d made it on Kiri—Kiba got inducted into a clan there, even!—but then …” 

Tears well up once more, clustering heavy in Lee’s long lower lashes. He shakes his head hard, and they splatter to the ground. 

“It’s still hard to talk about,” he chokes out. “You all are our last chance. Without the ship—”

Lee’s comment strikes a chord in Gaara. For all his reputation for bloodthirstiness, he isn’t entirely soulless. He stands, seizing a book from the top of the pile. It’s an old tome, written in one of the ancient Earth languages that Gaara has no hope of deciphering. He’s been able to discern the slightest bits and pieces from its pictographs and diagrams, but its text is as obscure to him as the planet's center.

Which is to say, with the right amount of digging, he might find it. 

He places the book in Lee’s lap, causing him to straighten with a start. 

“We were discussing an informational exchange.” The stiffness of Gaara's tone as he attempts to change the subject is perhaps not the most empathetic, but it has the desired effect of stopping Lee’s sniffling. “Do you recognize this language?” 

Lee squints down at the book, opening it and tracing one metal finger along the script. He mouths silently as he goes, putting shape to the words Gaara has never known the form of.

“This is … _really_ old,” he says. 

“All of our books are,” Gaara agrees. 

There were only a few volumes that made it to Suna when the first generation of ancestors left Earth. Their contents have been copied over and over with near-religious fervor to prevent deterioration. Transcribing the oldest of them is among Gaara’s most revered tasks, the words within trusted, like the Seed Bank, only to Suna’s leader. 

“It’s in—” Lee’s mouth shapes syllables Gaara’s tongue can’t hope to mimic, melodic and hushing. “That’s, um. That's the same language my papa spoke."

"It is?" Gaara does a poor job concealing his surprise.

"Yes! I mean, it's a super outdated version of it, of course, but I can still read most of it.”

The bridge of Lee’s nose wrinkles as he turns the pages.

“I was never any good at studies, so I might not be able to translate it or explain it all very well. This is a botany book, right?” 

Gaara nods.

“Ino is really the one who knows about that stuff. But …” 

That curious smile works across Lee’s face once more. The small, toothless one, warped and tinged with sorrow. 

He looks up at Gaara, and his dark eyes are brimming with tears once more. The light caught in them makes Gaara think of stars, sparkling against the black of his eyes. Though they are unlike any stars Gaara has ever seen in the Sunan sky, where the lack of atmosphere turns them to flat specks of light. They're all the more captivating for their strange twinkling. 

“I’ll do my best.” 

Gaara pulls his chair closer, so close their knees are nearly touching. Nearer than Gaara would sit to anyone but his siblings. And yet he feels a sort of comfort as Lee sounds out the words, a pull towards Lee’s proximity that he cannot quite define. 

They sit there, poring over Gaara’s books and scrolls, until the timer clicks over and even Lee's stars are cast into darkness.


	3. Cyberpunk

The mess the following morning feels far more crowded than twelve extra bodies can account for. 

Perhaps it’s the fact that the Konoha Twelve have occupied an entire table for themselves, squarely in the middle of the hall. Or perhaps it's the volume of their voices, raised fractious and bickering above the normally subdued murmur of the breakfast hour. The outsiders seem to solve even the slightest disagreement through shouting and slapstick imitations of violence, right down to a debate on which utensil is meant to be used for the oatmeal. 

“Gaara!” Rock Lee jumps to his feet just as Gaara is stepping from the kitchens with his bowl in his hands. “We’ve got room for one more!” 

The tables are designed for ten, and so the bench seats of the outsiders’ table are already overflowing with bodies. Worse yet, they’re all _touching_ , utterly unconcerned with the public display of physical intimacy. They’re attracting stares from all around the room, terse comments behind cupped hands and judging looks from the council members especially. 

Gaara glances to his siblings, pretending that he isn’t begging an excuse not to join the noisy crew. Temari shoos him on with a flick of her wrist. Kankuro doesn’t even pretend to hide his laugh at Gaara’s desperation. 

He steels himself. It will set a good example, he thinks, mingling with the outsiders. A show of faith from Suna’s leader, and hopefully a model for others to be more welcoming. Though he has no idea if feeling _unwelcome_ was the dynamic that led the outsiders to all be eating together this morning. 

Perhaps they just missed each other, having been separated overnight. After all, they’ve been each other’s sole companions for however long they were on that ship. 

He cannot say why his grip is so tight on his bowl as he approaches. He finds himself hesitating at Lee’s shoulder. 

“It might be best if you spread out for the next meal,” he says, voice quiet. 

The weight of so many strange pairs of eyes fixing on him is crushing. Gaara is no stranger to commanding a large force, to the rapt attention of Suna’s citizens, but something about the outsiders’ looks hangs differently. There’s a strange sense of dissection, a frangible tension. As the outsiders fall quiet, the volume of the Sunans’ whispers at his back intensifies.

“Totally!” Uzumaki is the one to shatter the silence. “I think we’re all just gettin’ used to things, right guys?” 

A chorus of nods and verbal agreement follows his statement. 

“Say, Gaara!” Lee spins fully in his seat. Under the brighter lights of the mess hall, his dark hair and eyes seem to shine all the more vividly. “Maybe you can settle this debate for us. Should we use the spoon or the fork for our, um … goo?” 

It’s then that Gaara notices all twelve bowls upon the table are untouched. 

“You’ve never eaten oatmeal before,” Gaara says flatly. 

“I _told_ you it wasn’t called _goo_ ,” says the woman seated to Lee’s left. Her hair is coiled in a new and elaborate structure today, though her braids are no less ornamented than the last time Gaara saw her. The spirals formed by her twin buns remind him of the fractal leaves of an echeveria.

“Because your Common vocabulary is so excellent,” says one of the twins—the long-haired one—in a droll voice. His pale eyes saccade so rapidly it’s difficult to tell quite where he’s looking. 

The woman scowls at him, snapping something in their Earth language. His only reply is to toss the long tail of his hair over his shoulder, turning away to whisper to his sibling. 

“Use the spoon,” Gaara interjects, before the argument can grow any more fraught. 

“Hot damn!” The slap of Uzumaki’s false hand on the tabletop rings so loudly that fully half the hall looks up from their meals. “See, what’d I tell ya?” 

Uchiha huffs, dropping the fork in his hand and grabbing the spoon from Uzumaki’s place setting. 

“Hey—!” Uzumaki shouts. 

“Sorry, I thought it was mine.”

“You little liar!” 

“If that’s all—” Gaara is loath to raise his voice, but he stands not a chance of being heard over their quarrel without doing so. “You should eat quickly. Breakfast will be over soon.”

“What happens after breakfast?” Lee asks. His expression is eager, his mouth crowned with a cheery grin. 

“You’ll perform your daily tasks. We’ll have you all harvesting metal from the ship to start, until we have a sense of your individual capabilities for more formalized contributions—”

“Holy shit!” The man with the silver-capped teeth smacks his lips and elbows the silent man sitting beside him, whose eyes are obscured by dark glasses. Inuzuka Kiba and Aburame Shino, Gaara asserts mentally. He has to do better thinking of them by name or he’ll never remember them all. It’s not that he has a poor memory, it’s just that he’s never had to learn quite so many names quite so fast. “This is amazing!” 

Aburame does not look up from the silent pursuit of the bottom of his bowl, while Inuzuka tucks back in all the more enthusiastically. There’s a rumble of agreement all around the table.

“It’s got so much flavor!” Lee’s elaborately plaited neighbor—Tenten—adds.

“And the _texture!_ ” rumbles stocky Akimichi Chouji.

“It’s only oatmeal,” Gaara protests.

Of course, only those with any skill or talent for cooking are assigned to the kitchens, but _oatmeal_ is hardly the most inspired recipe. It’s a fairly standard breakfast staple, certainly not worthy of the burgeoning enthusiasm shown by the clinking of the outsiders’ spoons, the wolfing noises of their mouths. 

“This is—no joke—the _best_ thing I’ve ever eaten,” asserts the willowy-framed woman with hair just a shade lighter than Temari’s whose name Gaara cannot quite recall. 

“What were you eating before?” Gaara asks, bewildered.

“Protein pouches, mostly.” The man who’d goaded Temari dabs the final traces of his meal from his goatee, and passes his bowl to Akimichi to be scraped clean.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had food that’s quite so fresh, before,” Lee says with quiet awe. He lifts his spoon with a reverence undeserved by such simple fare, savoring his last few bites. “You grew this here, right? In the gardens you were talking about?” 

Gaara nods despite his puzzlement. He knows for a fact that Mizu and Kaminari at the least have their own edible native plants. While they don’t have quite the diversity of Suna’s crops, and their soil quality is quite a bit poorer, he hadn’t realized the situation off Kaze was quite so dire.

“These oats are one of the more common strains in the Seed Bank.” 

His announcement sends a ripple of murmurs across the table. 

Uchiha looks up with a frown, the red light in his eye steadily blinking. “So it’s true?” 

The Seed Bank’s existence is among the worst-kept secrets of the human colonies: a living relic of all of the now-abandoned Earth’s edible and functional plants. A manmade Eden that has assumed the status of whispered myth. Gaara has heard, occasionally, the echoes of those rumors over the communication channels, though reception is spotty this far out from the other villages. 

Gaara inclines his head just slightly. 

“Say, you got any meat down in that bank of yours?” Inuzuka’s ruddy markings stretch as he bares his filed teeth in a smile. “I would kill for a juicy piece of pork right about now. Haven’t had any since Kiri.” 

Gaara refrains from commenting that the native fauna of Mizu emphatically do not include anything even slightly resembling an Earth pig, and that whatever they had called ‘pork’ almost certainly wasn’t. 

“We don’t keep animals,” he explains instead. “Our population is strictly vegetarian. It’s the most ecologically viable system for our foodways. Animals are messy and temperamental. They take up space that could otherwise be used for crops or people, and they require a substantial investment of resources—medical care, bedding, cleaning supplies … not to mention their own food.” 

Kaze has a few native animals—during the first phases of the colonization project, signs of plant or animal life were required to consider a planet _habitable_ —but none of them are particularly fit for human consumption. The surface fauna tend to be heavily armored against the heat or insulated against the cold, and the amount of effort it takes to crack through their exoskeletons is hardly worth it for the scant, gamy flesh inside. And even those that are less heavily defended are virtually inedible. The Stone Sucker, for example, absorbs so much ammonia as part of its water retention mechanism that its meat is unpalatably bitter. 

There is really no need for animal sources of protein, in any case, because the Seed Bank’s stores contain a wealth of seeds, nuts, and legumes. The gardens produce a nutritionally complete diet with vegetable proteins alone, and vitamin supplementation takes care of any lack. 

“I guess that makes sense,” Inuzuka says, though he sounds tremendously disappointed. 

“You’ll have to get used to it,” murmurs Aburame behind the high collar of his jacket. Among all the outsiders, he’s dressed the most drab, in faded sandy tones that could almost blend in with the rest of the Sunans. “Since we’re going to be staying here.” 

A bell chimes overhead, sending the populace into motion. General tidying isn’t a specialized skill, and though there’s a dedicated janitorial crew who take care of deep cleaning and maintenance work in the tunnels, the light cleaning that follows a meal is a communal responsibility. 

The work is predictably seamless—each table dividing their tasks neatly, some collecting bowls and utensils while others gather napkins for the laundry and yet more shove the tables aside so the floors can be swept clean—except for the outsiders, who remain standing uncertainly in the center of the room, like an island unto themselves. 

“All right!” Uzumaki claps his hands with a discordant ring of flesh on metal. “Look alive, everyone!” 

“Just copy what everyone else is doing,” Gaara advises them, over the screech of table legs on the stone floor. “I have to go now.” 

“Oh!” Lee frowns, the expression tugging at his curious features. “You’re not coming with us to the ship?” 

“My responsibilities lie with the Seed Bank,” Gaara replies. “I’ll see you at midday.” 

Before he takes his leave, he glances down at the bowl growing cold in his hands. He hasn’t had the chance to take a single bite of his breakfast. He’ll take it with him, and beg forgiveness from the kitchen crew later. Matsuri’s family is on the breakfast rotation this week, and she’s always had a soft spot for him. 

Well, at least leadership has its benefits.

  


* * *

  


“How are things going with the outsiders?” 

The lunch bell sees Temari slumping dust-coated and weary into the seat across from Gaara. She grabs a glass of water and takes a long pull before she speaks. 

“Better than expected, honestly. They’re surprisingly hardy little bastards. Even the defective ones. That roommate of yours—Rock?” She mangles the final consonant. “He can _move_. Never seen anything quite like it.” 

“Their prostheses are very impressive,” Gaara agrees.

“The prosthetic or the guy attached to it?” Kankuro ribs from beside her. “You know he was just _gushing_ about you when I was picking ‘em up for mess this morning. Didn’t even realize he was talkin’ about you at first. Seems to think you’re quite the gentleman.” 

Gaara ignores him to focus on his sister. “Do you think you’ll be finished in time?” 

The natural day-night rotation of Kaze does not align with the cycle of the tunnels, and so it’s still dark on the surface as they tuck into their lunches. They’re lucky for it: surface time in daylight is necessarily limited, between the heat and the blinding light. Hopefully they’ll finish dismantling the ship before the cycle flips, when the surface goes bright for days on end. Surface daylight brings with it high winds, and the combination of the harsh light and the abrasive sand carried with it will corrode any remaining metal with a swiftness. 

“If we can keep up this pace, yeah. As long as they don’t get lazy. You figured out where you’re assigning them after?” 

Gaara scans the room. True to their promise, the outsiders are scattered across the hall this time. Some are seated with the families that are housing them; others seemingly have picked their tables at random. Uzumaki is engaged in what appears to be a rousing debate with a few of Temari’s recovery crew, while Akimichi is deep in conversation with Matsuri, who’s relieved of her cooking duties until tomorrow’s breakfast. There’s only one person who Gaara can’t locate.

The clearing of a throat behind his shoulder makes him turn. 

There stands Rock Lee, mess tray in hand, an uncertain smile on his face. 

“I hope I’m not intruding,” he says. Surface dust is caked into his dark eyebrows and the fringe of his hair, giving him the appearance of a much older man. 

Temari’s responding grin is wicked. 

“By all means,” she chimes in before Gaara can answer. 

Lee sits beside Gaara, far too close for propriety, and the half-inch of space between them that had seemed charged with magnetism the night before now smarts of embarrassment as Temari’s gaze darts from one face to another. Her smile only sharpens. 

“What brings you this way, Rock?” 

“Just Lee, please!” he protests, in between bites of his food. “I had just hoped to ask Gaara for a favor, after we’re done eating?” 

“Wow, already askin’ favors of the boss-man?” Kankuro drawls. “Pretty bold of you.”

That burnished flush creeps across Lee’s cheeks once more, and he ducks his head to shovel more food into his mouth. Gaara realizes he’s using the spoon again, though the meal is a fresh salad. He points subtly to the fork until Lee takes the hint. The spoon hits his tray with a resounding clatter, and Lee’s pace of eating only speeds once he has the fork in hand. 

“I don’t mean to impose!” Lee squeaks after one noisy gulp. “It’s just, um, my arm—”

Gaara’s brow drops into a furrow instantly. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing, nothing!” But Gaara notices then that Lee is eating with his right hand, when that morning he had been eating with his left. The artificial limb hangs suspiciously limp at his side. “It’s just, um. If we are going to keep working at the same pace after lunch, I need to charge it again. I didn’t realize how different the electrical current is here from on the ship. You all are very efficient!” He turns to Gaara, his eyes wide, expression pleading. “Would you be able to let me back in the room? I tried to go down as soon as we got back, but then I realized I don’t have a key.” 

“That’s fine,” Gaara says shortly. 

Lee beams, setting down his fork. And then—it seems to happen in slow motion—he reaches out with his good hand … grabs Gaara’s forearm … and _squeezes._

“Thank you so much!” 

His grip is firm, the skin shockingly warm for someone who just returned from the surface. 

Gaara simply stares at the point of contact. 

“Wow, Kankuro, you’re done already?” Temari stands abruptly, seizing Kankuro’s tray and stacking it atop her own.

“Hey, I wasn’t—!”

The clamor of their movements is barely distracting enough to drag Gaara’s eyes from the hand on his arm.

“You sure must have been hungry!” Temari says with obvious false cheer.

Kankuro scowls at her. There’s a brief moment of silent conversation between the two of them, something unreadable exchanged in their stares. Then Kankuro sighs, and the tension snaps. He heaves himself to his feet, making a show of his exhaustion. 

Temari throws Gaara a wink, and his siblings hurry away. 

Gaara stares at their backs for a beat. It’s only then that he realizes Lee’s hand is still resting on his arm. 

“I’ll—” He clears his throat, uncertain why the words have gotten stuck. “Might as well go now.”

  


* * *

  


“How are you finding the work?” Gaara asks, once they’re back in the room. 

Lee’s arm is humming quietly on the desk as it recharges. It’s strange to see him without it, for all that Gaara knew it had to be detachable. Lee’s sleeve is rolled up, and Gaara can see now the socket on his shoulder, the places where shiny metal is bolted into brown skin. The reconstruction spreads much further than Gaara predicted, spiderwebs of metal and wire vanishing up the rolled sleeve with joists and brackets. 

“It’s attached to an external spine, which is hooked up to what’s left of my original backbone,” Lee answers the question Gaara didn’t ask, following the trail of his gaze. “So that it can respond to my nerve impulses. The leg is, too, but it holds a charge much better.”

He sticks his leg out and turns it to and fro with a little hiss of decompression. Beneath the thick trousers and boots, Lee’s left leg looks identical to his right, its artificial nature only revealed by its mechanical sounds. The outsiders were all equipped with Sunan gear for their mission to the ship, and Lee looks rather diminished outside of his bright greens, the darkness of his eyes and hair all the starker against the tan of his cloak. 

“And the work is going great, actually!” He chirps. “It’s nice to be able to stretch my legs after being cooped up in that room for weeks. I did most of the heavy lifting, back on the ship, so this job isn’t much different. Everyone’s handling it really well, though. And with it begin so dark, even Neji and Hinata aren’t at much of a disadvantage.” 

“They can see in the dark?” From Temari’s dossier, Gaara had assumed them entirely blind.

“I … don’t quite know how to translate the name of their condition,” Lee falters. “But they see better in low light than bright light. I think the tunnels have been a relief for them, actually. They seem to be getting around much easier. Certainly compared to when we were on Tsuchi.” 

“I see.” 

The revelation means it’s all the more important that they finish the retrieval mission before the surface goes daylight. Gaara makes a mental note to communicate this to Temari, his mind already ticking over possible future placements for the two, mapping which areas of the tunnels are dimmest. The darkest area of course is the annals of the Seed Bank, where the photosensitive seeds are kept in locked storage, but hardly any Sunans are permitted access to the Bank, much less outsiders. 

He flicks through the comms reports while he mulls the possibilities over. There’s not much of note—an approaching solar flare that Suna doesn’t have to worry about because all their infrastructure is so deep within the planet, unrest between two major clans on Kiri that will never reach Suna’s borders, a report of outlaws scavenging the outskirts of major colony cities. This last he almost laughs at. Outlaws do not, as a rule, make it to Kaze, and those that do do not survive. Full-blown invasions and expeditions have been cut at the knee by the climate alone. The report of a ship breaking up out of orbit catches his eye, and he sets this aside. If any of the debris happens to stray close enough to Kaze, they may end up with more metal than they know what to do with. 

“I have a question,” Lee says, after a moment of silence punctuated only by the hiss of his toes flexing in his surface boots. “What happens once we’re done taking apart the ship? You mentioned _contributions_ … how does that work? Are they like jobs? How are they assigned?” 

The deluge of questions forces a sigh from Gaara. He sits at the desk and gathers his latest set of transcriptions. The work is painstaking but requires little brainpower, and he might as well try to get some of it done if he’s going to be forced to detail the minutiae of Sunan society. 

“You’ll each need to find your place here. Make yourselves useful. Whatever talents you might have, special skills. If we have a need for that sort of labor, we can use you. You mentioned Yamanaka knows a lot about botany—we’ll probably put her to work in the gardens. Aburame, too, if he’s knowledgeable about insects.” 

“And what if …” Lee toes the ground, the squeal of the boot’s sole against the stone enough to turn Gaara’s head. “What if I don’t have any special talent?” 

“Everyone has skills,” Gaara replies flatly. 

Lee shakes his head so hard that the dust flies from the clipped ends of his hair. 

“Not me. I’m nothing special.”

“You can read these books.” Gaara gestures to the pile he sorted last night. He’d gone through his stacks and set aside the ones in Lee’s father’s language to be read later, when they both have the time to spare. He tells himself that memory of Lee’s voice, careful in its precision, and his surprising gentleness handling the fragile pages did not factor into his eagerness to have the task done. Any giddiness he’d felt was more likely lightheadedness, brought on by his uncharacteristically late breakfast. “That sort of knowledge is valuable.”

“I’m not even very good at that!” Lee protests. “If Tenten’s Common vocabulary were even a little bit better, she’d be a much more suitable translator.”

Gaara remembers Tenten stumbling over the basic syntax and semantics of a breakfast conversation and winces. 

“But she isn’t. You’re clearly the better choice.” 

Lee shrugs off the reassurance. “How many of those books do you even have?” 

A glance over the piles on his desk is not as helpful as Gaara had hoped. 

“Perhaps … twice as many. There are more in storage, but I’m not sure how many of those are in your language.”

“So what happens when you run out?” Lee laughs, but the sound is forced, stiff. “What then?”

His eyes are watering again, and Gaara turns to grope in his desk for the handkerchief he’d freshly laundered. He passes it to Lee, but Lee’s responding smile is weak. 

“I don’t have a head for technology like Shikamaru,” he says, voice dropping until it just barely echoes in the cramped room. “I’m not good with kids like Kiba or a cook like Chouji. Even on the ship, all I really did was carry things around and put them where people told me to …” He looks up at Gaara, and his expression is so pained that Gaara’s stomach lurches. “I don’t want to disappoint you, but all I really have going for me is that I’m strong.”

“So do that.”

“What?”

“Be strong,” Gaara says simply. “We always need general labor and defense. Especially come harvest time. There aren’t many people down here with …” Gaara turns back to his papers, daring his skin to flush at the words that come next. “... _muscles_ like yours. You’re remarkable for your stature alone. And Temari said you’re faster than any of your crewmates. There’s certainly a place for you.” 

He hardly knows what he’s saying. Reassuring an outsider of his place within Suna? And one with such hindrances at that, the evidence of them sucking up electricity on his desk even as he speaks? If it weren’t for the ship’s metal, he would never even have considered allowing such a thing. And yet the impulse, the _desire_ to comfort Lee … it’s overwhelming. As incontrovertible and irresistible as the planet’s rotation around the sun. 

Gaara is so focused on avoiding Lee’s eye contact that he doesn’t hear the cot moving, nor sense the vibration of the steps across the narrow floor. 

He’s thrown suddenly into a one-armed hug from behind. 

“Thank you,” the breath gusts against his ear, humid. 

Lee’s body is tremendously warm against the ambient chill of the tunnels. His affection, startling. He smells like the salt of sweat or tears, like the grease of metal joints, like Suna’s own dust clouds.

Gaara doesn’t quite know how to respond. It’s not that Sunans don’t embrace. It’s just that such closeness is normally reserved for family … or lovers.

Gaara swallows hard. He can feel Lee’s mechanically steady heartbeat through both their ribcages. 

He doubts Lee means anything quite so profound. After all, Gaara has seen the easy affection shared between the Konoha Twelve. The way they pile upon each other like children in play, before they’re taught better. Perhaps that’s all this is—that childlike, rough-and-tumble, tactile nature that all the outsiders’ interactions seem imbued with. 

“Nobody has believed in me like that since …” Lee whispers.

His nose is in Gaara’s hair, pressed against his scalp. Gaara can feel every movement of his bowed lips, scarcely muffled by Gaara’s curls. He shivers. 

Then all of a sudden, Lee releases him. He’s halfway across the floor by the time Gaara has regained his bearings, dark eyes fixed on the cot’s mattress. 

“I’m sorry!” he blurts. His false foot taps rapidly against the floor as he jiggles his leg. His posture is hunched, racked with anxiety. “Should I not have?” 

“It’s … fine,” Gaara replies breathlessly. His hand drifts idly to his chest, feels his heart hammering against his palm, its tempo so utterly, unevenly organic.

“I’m always getting into trouble for that sort of thing—”

“Hugging?” 

“Cultural insensitivity.” 

Lee’s wide eyes are pulled wider by his panic, that same darkness of the space between stars, like a tunnel with all the lights turned out. Perfect, depthless blackness. 

Gaara’s back is still warm from him, the touch of his arm like a band of heat across his chest. The room’s chill causes it to fade all too quickly. 

“I know things aren’t the same here as they are on Earth,” Lee stammers, “and I didn’t even ask—”

“I said it’s fine,” Gaara repeats, hardly recognizing his own voice in its wavering. 

“If you’re sure …” 

Something starts beeping, and it takes a moment for Gaara to register that the sound is coming from Lee’s arm on the desk. 

Lee is careful not to touch Gaara as he ducks past him to retrieve it. He’s hasty in the complex sequence of reattaching it to his shoulder. 

“I really am sorry,” he calls from the door, scrambling back into his outerwear. “I promise I’ll be more conscious of your boundaries!”

Gaara does not make a habit of repeating himself, and yet he finds himself saying once more, “It’s _fine_.” 

But the repetition doesn’t slow his heart’s pounding. Not until he’s deep within the Seed Bank, elbow-deep in fresh soil.


	4. Across the Stars

“We have a problem.” 

Temari’s words come through as a dull crackling from the speaker high up on the wall. This deep in the Seed Bank, even Gaara's siblings can’t reach him without using the radios. Its location is concealed to all but Suna's leader and a tiny handful of maintenance and engineering staff, all of them sworn to secrecy. 

The wireless communication devices that they use for surface expeditions and the main areas of the tunnels struggle with projecting this deep, between the curling, reduplicative tracts of stone and the heavily reinforced walls lined with aluminum. The labyrinth leading down to the Bank is enough to confuse most human invaders, and the shielding prevents it from being detected by most radars, but this also means that hard-wiring is the only way to get in touch with someone once they’re inside the Bank. 

The Seed Bank is technically a misnomer. While the walls are indeed stacked with jars upon jars of dried and frozen seeds, carefully climate and moisture-controlled to protect against degradation, not all seeds can be kept in stasis. And not all of the plants in the gardens can be so easily regrown if a crop fails or the village needs to relocate. For those seeds, their progenitors are also kept within the Bank, alive and carefully tended by Gaara alone. Trees, especially, are both particularly prone to dying in the preservation process and take much too long to reach maturation. They cannot be replaced if they are destroyed, and without their resources—their fruits and their wood—Suna would be in a dire position indeed. Growing within these walls are the self-same trees—and their descendants—that were borne on the original colony ships as seedlings, hand-raised by some of Earth’s last biologists.

It’s said that the scientists refused to eat of them, even on the final legs of the long journey from Earth, when food was scarce and the survival of the fledgling colony was uncertain. Many of them starved in the perfecting of Suna's agricultural techniques, rather than consume the last individuals of a species. Because in saving their own lives, they would have doomed the future of the village.

It’s through their sacrifice that the trees—and Suna’s people—live on to this day. 

Gaara is up on a ladder, pruning back the branches of a lemon tree, when Temari’s next message comes through.

“It’s one of the outsiders.” 

Gaara sheds his gardening gloves and pulls on the magnetized ones with his teeth. He’s already locking the Seed Bank’s door, clipping on an earpiece, when he responds, “Where are you?” 

“Medical unit. Room three.” 

The nanites sweep him up the tunnels faster than his feet can run, and then he’s throwing the door to the sick room wide. The tiny space is crowded with bodies: Temari. Tenten. Lee. Hyuuga Hinata. And a crumpled form on the bed with a blanket pulled up over its head. 

“Who’s that?” he asks. 

“It’s Neji,” Hinata stammers out in her airy falsetto. “He’s got light-sickness.” 

The deconstruction of the outsiders’ ship has not proceeded at the pace Gaara hoped. Once the simple outer shell was stripped, its inner workings proved far more delicate and complex than anyone had anticipated. Additionally, they’ve lost several of the team to more pressing tasks: more mouths to feed means more pressure for the cooking crew, and Akimichi had been quickly conscripted to the kitchens; likewise, the increased need for crops had required Aburame and Yamanaka to join the workers in the gardens sooner than expected. And the extraction of the data from the ship’s computer necessitated that Uzumaki and Uchiha remain in the tunnels with the engineers. Apparently when Uchiha disclosed the computers were bio-locked, he’d neglected to mention that they required the simultaneous application of both his and Uzumaki’s fingerprints. And while that had certainly answered some of Gaara’s questions about the nature of their cooperative leadership arrangement, the near-halving of the surface team had necessarily slowed the work. 

It’s been ten tunnel days since Kaze’s surface went daylight, and the worst of the heat has yet to even begin. Technically speaking, they are still experiencing the sunrise, and once Sol is fully above them in the sky, the surface will be too prohibitively warm for even the short jaunts they’ve been constrained to. 

The body on the bed groans. 

“Have you contacted Councilwoman Chiyo?” Gaara’s eyes flick to Temari.

“She’s on her way, but you know she moves slower these days.” 

Gaara knows indeed. That will prove to be its own problem in due time. 

“Is your ship’s physician familiar with his condition?” Gaara directs the question at Hyuuga Hinata, already dressed in her surface gear and trembling like a leaf. 

“Sakura knows, but—” She has her goggles pushed up on top of her head, and her periwinkle-pale eyes shake just as violently as her voice, her gaze darting to Tenten. 

Tenten grabs the other woman’s hand and squeezes. That casual Earth affection. 

Lee has not hugged Gaara again since that night, and Gaara has come to accept that whatever meaning his body had read into the embrace was misunderstood. Mistranslated, as so many things with the outsiders have been. 

“It’s a—” Tenten searches the air for the word for a moment. “—gene problem. They were born with it. There’s no cure.” 

“Is there some sort of medication he needs?” 

If there is, and the outsiders haven’t brought it with them, Gaara will be shocked if it’s found within Suna’s meager medical stores. The medical unit is pared-down and efficient, with treatments for short-term illnesses—sprains and fractures, allergies, head-colds, stomach bugs—but nothing to treat any long-term disability. There is no point to prolonging a life at the expense of the survival of the village, and no reason to invest substantial resources in the recovery of a person who will no longer be able to contribute. 

“I told them I don’t need medicine.” Hyuuga Neji tugs the blankets off his face with some effort, but his eyes are squinted tightly shut. His voice rasps and wavers from his twisted lips. “It’s not serious. I just need to rest.” 

“For how long?” Temari barks from the corner. She’s suited up just like the rest of them, fingers tight on her cannon. “We’re burning time right now.” 

“Just—” 

Neji attempts to sit up, gets halfway onto an elbow, and collapses back with a whine. His head thrashes, pressing his face into the thin pillow on the cot. 

Hinata rushes to him, pulls the blanket up over his head once more and tucks it in tightly. She looks up at Temari, and though her hands shake on the blanket, she swallows hard and finds her voice. 

“When does the sun go down next?” 

“In about forty tunnel days. It’s only going to get brighter before it does.” 

Hinata shakes her head. “The brighter it gets, the more difficult it is for us. Even with the goggles.” 

Temari clicks her tongue. 

“If this is going to continue to be an issue,” Gaara says stiffly, “we’ll need to have certain discussions with your leaders. We were promised you would pull your own weight despite your … conditions. We can’t accommodate someone laying in bed for days on end, not if it’s going to keep happening.” 

The tension in the room ramps up. There’s a creak and a hiss as Lee’s fist tenses. 

His eyes have been on Gaara, dark and serious, since Gaara first entered the room. His expression is pinched and stern. Gaara has felt it on him like hands, both flesh and metal, familiar in their weight, their texture, the lines on their palms.

Because while Lee has not hugged Gaara again, he’s continued to touch him. Almost thoughtlessly. On his shoulder, his wrist, the small of his back. In the public of the mess hall and in the private of their shared room. As if the contact means nothing.

Perhaps it doesn’t. The Konoha Twelve always seem to have their hands on each other. Gaara has seen Lee leaning on Tenten’s shoulders, chin on the top of her head and his arms draped over her chest. He’s seen him bump fists with Inuzuka and bump chests with Akimichi. He’s seen him with Uzumaki in a one-armed embrace, and with his hand rubbing soothing circles on Haruno’s thin back. 

“We’ll cover for him,” Lee announces, his voice steely. “Whatever work he was supposed to do today, the rest of us will do it. We won’t let the project fall behind, but we won’t let Neji make himself sicker. Right?” 

“Right.” Tenten crosses her arms. Hinata steps back from the sick bed, nodding hurriedly. 

“Temari.” Gaara turns to his sister, carefully refraining from meeting the intensity of Lee’s stare. “Delay your departure a few minutes so I can suit up.”

“Gaara—” she begins, wary, but he cuts her off.

“I’d like to supervise the expedition today.”

  


* * *

  


The team hits the surface at a light jog. 

The faster they get to and from the ship, the less time they’re exposed to the daylight. The surface of Kaze is simmering under Sol’s relentless rays, the air hazy with dust kicked up by the high winds. The air circulation offers no relief from the punishing heat, and even the insulation of the surface gear does little to stop the sweat from bursting beneath Gaara’s arms and down the back of his neck after just a few moments in the aridity, like the very air is sucking the water from his skin. 

A flick of his wrist brings the nanites up under his feet—better to conserve the energy now so he can help with dismantling the ship once they arrive—and carries him to the front of the pack, where Temari leads the group on.

Well, _almost_ to the front of the pack.

Because Lee is sprinting on ahead of the rest of them, so quickly that his feet hardly seem to touch the sandy earth at all. His step is as light as a native Sunan’s, leaving no trenches behind from his footsteps like the rest of the outsiders. Every few yards he turns to wave and call back to the team, cheerful exhortations whose exact wording is lost to the wind but whose encouragement still carries. 

Gaara sees now why Temari had so much to say about Lee that first day. 

He’s not just impressive, he’s _magnificent_. 

He skips and hops over the traps laid in their path like he’s been navigating this route his entire life, throwing a hand up in warning as each obstacle approaches so the rest of the team is forewarned. 

“He came up with that system himself,” Temari huffs between heavy breaths. “Watch the handsigns.”

Lee jumps, and then his gloved hand makes a fist, pinky and thumb extended.

“That one means sand trap. Doesn’t matter what exit we leave from, either. He knows ‘em all.”

Another sign flashes in the air, three fingers up this time. 

“See? Spike pit.”

And Gaara knows before the rest of the group even arrives at the obstacle that Lee is right. In less than a month, Lee has mentally mapped the entire desert from the tunnel exits to the ship’s landing site. It’s a skill that has taken Gaara the better part of his life to learn. 

The rest of the team—even the few Sunans on Temari’s crew—clearly benefit from his talent as well. The trip out to the ship proceeds much more quickly than any surface expedition Gaara has ever seen, without the need for slow and careful plodding, prodding the sand for obscured hazards and constantly consulting maps. 

Though not all dangers can be so easily predicted.

Perhaps five meters ahead, the sand begins to rumble. 

“Fuck,” Temari grits out. 

Gaara drops his hand and touches back down to the earth at a dead run. 

“Lee—!” 

The sunlight on Kaze brings the exotherms out of their dens, ready to bask in the light and replenish their energy. And now the ground is churning, dust thrown like a sandstorm as a massive Earth Thrower rears up out of its burrow, its claws shredding the topsoil. It’s the largest Gaara has ever seen, twice the height of a man. Its colorless carapace is so thick that the muscle beneath appears just as grey streaks, and its teeth are gnashing in its snarling jaws, milky eyes darting for any sign of motion. 

It must have felt their vibrations in the sand. 

Earth Throwers hibernate deep within the planet during Kaze’s long, frigid nights. Their burrows are said to have laid the groundwork for the original Sunan tunnels, and the stories of the battles to evict them from their homes are bloody indeed. Unlike most of the native fauna—the thick-bellied Stone Suckers whose radial teeth churn stone into dust to extract its nutrients, or the tiny Tap Worms who suckle at the roots of the sparse, hardy plantlife—Earth Throwers are carnivorous.

And this one looks particularly hungry, lunging at the lone figure separated from their pack. 

Lee. 

The only person who hasn’t frozen in his tracks. 

Before he can think of safety or tactics or even common sense, Gaara is throwing himself into the fray. A sweep of his arms sends his nanites glittering into the air between Lee and the creature. A clench of his fist solidifies the particles into an iron wall. 

The Earth Thrower hits the metal with a _clang_ , its claws shrieking down the surface. The noise is so shrill Gaara nearly flinches back to cover his ears. 

The air is still vibrating when he spies movement out of the corner of his eye. 

Lee dodges up and over the shimmering wall of nanites. His toe-tip bounds off its crest, and his metal fist pulls back. For a moment, he’s airborne, his figure nothing but a black silhouette against the rising sun. 

And then he punches forward, and his arm _pops off_ his shoulder, with a report like gunpowder igniting. 

It goes sailing through the air, trailing smoke … and plunges straight through the creature’s throat. 

The Earth Thrower’s exoskeleton cracks with a sound reminiscent of a tree being felled. It makes a noise—a choked-off, gurgling screech—and then it’s falling. 

And Lee is falling beneath it.

Gaara reaches out with both arms, forming desperate fists, and the nanites take the shape of his hands grabbing Lee’s ankles to drag him backwards. Lee’s good arm goes up to protect his face. 

At the last moment, the Earth Thrower tosses its head, lashing for Lee’s remaining hand. 

And it would have connected, if not for the fact that the prosthesis seizes this moment to boomerang back. The fist cuts through the creature’s throat from a perpendicular angle. 

Its head falls, neatly bisected, to the earth. 

It’s as if a great and simultaneous breath has been released. 

Lee catches his flying arm in his outstretched hand, holding it aloft, victorious. The outsiders—and even a few of the Sunans—burst into subdued, disbelieving cheers, still reeling with awe. Scattered laughter carries on the wind. 

Gaara sets Lee down as gently as he can manage, and it’s just a few seconds before Lee finds his bearings, rolling his sleeve and popping his arm back into its socket. 

“I’m glad you came with us,” Lee says, panting. Though the mask and goggles obscure his entire expression, Gaara can’t help but get the feeling that Lee is _grinning_ at him.

  


* * *

  


The next steps of the ship's disassembly are undertaken with brutal efficiency. 

Temari, unexpectedly, falls back so Nara can call the shots, given his familiarity with the ship’s construction. Separating the delicate wires without damaging them requires a deft hand, and Gaara finds himself swearing more than once as the screwdriver slips in his gloved fingers and he nearly loses tiny bolts to the sand below. 

At least there’s a bit of shade and enough left of the ship’s hulking metal skeleton to serve as a windbreak. Though it’s still daylight, and therefore not safe to do much more than pull up the bottom of their masks for desperate sips of water. 

Gaara tells himself that Lee’s hand doesn’t linger when he passes him the canteen.

Even with the scant reprieve from the sun and wind, the work can only last for so long—they can only take back as much as they can carry, and they can only carry what won’t slow them down for the long trek back to the tunnels. 

The sun is only more piercing as Lee guides them back, striding ahead with that same boundless energy, throwing hand signals and calling encouragement over his shoulder. Gaara would have assumed him tired, after running across the sand all morning, dismantling part of his body to take down a beast that even the most hardened of Sunan warriors would flee from, and now carrying his and Hyuuga Neji’s weight worth of metal components. And yet Lee’s enthusiasm has flagged not one bit. 

He’s just ushering them past a tripwire when Gaara hears the cry. 

It’s not coming from Lee, but from somewhere in the back of the group. 

Gaara pauses, turning.

Hyuuga Hinata is on the ground with her head clutched in her hands. 

The metal framework that she’s been hauling lies at an ugly angle beside her, one of its girders bent from being dropped. 

Tenten, Haruno, and Lee all rush over to her. 

“Is it the sunlight?” Haruno asks. She looks as if she’s about to remove a glove to probe Hyuuga’s face, but a curt gesture from Temari has her thinking better of it. Instead, she lays her covered palms at Hyuuga’s temples. 

Hyuuga nods pitifully. 

Gaara approaches, but he cannot hear her making a sound. 

Tenten and Lee kneel down at either side of her. 

“Can you stand?” Haruno’s tone is clinical but still tinged with concern. 

Hyuuga gropes blindly in the sand in front of her, gets a palm to the earth only for her elbow to buckle, her arm trembling. She shakes her head slowly. 

“Someone grab the metal,” Gaara instructs. “Leave her. She’ll make it back under her own power or she won’t.” 

He cannot see their eyes, but he can feel the heat of the outsiders’ gazes as a half-dozen faces turn to him in a single gesture. 

“What the hell?” barks Inuzuka. “Is this some kind of sick joke?” 

“It’s not a joke.” Temari comes to stand at Gaara’s shoulder with her arms crossed. “It’s protocol. The mission is more important than one weakened individual.”

“That’s bullshit!” Tenten cries from her position on the ground. She’s got Hyuuga’s face tucked against her neck, clutching her fiercely. “She’s a person! That’s just a hunk of junk.”

“And one is a more valuable resource than the other,” Gaara says, beginning to turn. “Let’s go. We’re wasting time. If we’re out here too long, all of us will end up with heatstroke.” 

“No.” The familiar voice is firm in a way that Gaara has never heard before. 

When he looks back, Lee is standing tall in the sand, Hyuuga’s burden thrown around his shoulders like it weighs nothing at all. He’s still clutching his own double-load under each arm, and yet he doesn’t waver. 

“We’re not leaving her. If someone needs help, that just means we all need to work twice as hard.” 

Gaara hears Temari’s indrawn breath, her gasp of shock. 

There’s the sound of fabric ripping, and then Tenten holds up a strip of her surface cloak like a banner. The thick cloth gutters in the wind. 

She turns, and affixes it around Hyuuga’s eyes.

“Any light getting in?” she asks.

Hyuuga shakes her head, just barely. 

“Kiba,” she calls. 

“Right.” Inuzuka passes off half of what he’s carrying to Nara. His back bows under the weight, but he does not complain. 

Then Inuzuka is stooping in the dirt, too, throwing one of Hyuuga’s arms over his shoulder while Tenten takes the other. They gain their feet clumsily, Tenten shifting her cloth bag of parts from her back to one shoulder. 

They take a single, wary step, and Tenten stumbles.

“Here.” Haruno snatches the bag from her shoulder and straps it across her front. “I’ve got this if you’ve got her.”

Gaara watches the entire proceedings scarcely believing his own eyes. How easily they move to accommodate one another. How faultlessly they take on each other’s burdens, without the slightest hint of complaint. How smoothly they accept one of their number’s failings without judgment. 

“Do as you like,” Gaara says, finally. “But don’t fall behind.”

And then they’re off.

  


* * *

  


Most of the outsiders are nowhere to be found at the midday meal—taking up space in the medical unit now that two of their number have fallen ill, Gaara assumes with a lurch in his stomach that could be indigestion or could be regret for his poor choices. 

He sits down heavily across from his siblings, and Kankuro doesn’t need to ask to know that neither his brother nor his sister are up for any conversation this mealtime. 

Gaara packs his food away methodically, cutting slices of his tempeh with the exact same rote thoughtlessness as he transcribes the tiny, meaningless sigils in the ancient books. He looks up from his tray only once, and when he does, he catches the methodical red blink of Uchiha’s false eye. 

He’s in such a state of distraction and irritability all afternoon that he slices his palm neatly open on the trunk of a candleholder cactus just as he’s getting ready to finish his day’s work. The wound isn’t severe, but it is bleeding heavily. Which means Gaara’s only able to wear one glove back to his room—he can’t risk saturating the fabric of the other and ruining the components inside. The nanites surge around him awkwardly as he travels, only-half carrying him up the tunnels. They’re disarrayed by his clumsy, one-handed motions, and he’s distracted by licking the blood off his palm.

He’s in no better state of composure when Lee returns to the room. 

“You skipped lunch,” Gaara says, hearing the door slide open behind him. “That was unwise. Physical labor without adequate nutrition and hydration can cause you to become debilitated.” 

“It was just one meal,” Lee says over the hiss of the door gliding shut, his tone acid. “And I had to go check on Neji and Hinata. That’s what _friends_ do. They look out for each other.” 

Gaara doesn’t reply. Blood is pooling in his palm again, trickling down the furrow of his heartline and headline. He’s thinking about Lee’s chapped lips, his metal spine and electric heart. If the same ideals of martyrdom led him to both. Does he also refuse water, so some other, weaker person might drink it? What harm did he throw himself in the way of—and in whose defense—to end up with such grievous wounds?

“You really upset Kiba and Shino, you know. Everyone’s angry, but those two are the closest to her.” Lee is setting things down heavily behind him, slamming drawers open and unzipping his pack with a vengeance. The cot rattles against the wall as he throws something down on the mattress. “It’s like you all don’t even _care_ about having a positive relationship with us. Have you ever heard the phrase _you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar?_ ” 

“Flies are also attracted to decomposition,” Gaara says lowly.

“This is no time for your jokes! You—Oh.” Lee’s arm is set down on the desk beside him. A warm hand touches his shoulder. “You’re bleeding.” 

Gaara’s gloved fist tenses, and the nanites rile. 

Lee bats them aside, sidestepping them easily to creep closer. 

“Is it painful?”

“It’s superficial.” 

But Lee is already spinning the chair around, fingers wrapped around Gaara’s wrist. They’re so long—or Gaara’s wrist is so thin—that they fit around the bone entirely, with overlap to spare. A warm, warm thumb strokes his palm, just beside the cut. Blood leaks from the wound.

“This is deep. Do you want me to take you to the medical unit?” 

“That would be a waste of supplies. It will heal on its own.” 

“You should at least bandage it.” 

Gaara wrenches his hand away from Lee’s gentle grasp, nanites surging. He laps up the excess blood before it can spill onto his trousers. 

“There’s no way that’s hygienic.” Lee says, eyes fixed on Gaara’s mouth as he licks the blood off his lips. 

“I didn’t realize you were a medic,” Gaara says curtly.

“I know enough about First Aid to wrap a cut. Just—”

Lee grabs his arm off the desk and jams it back into its socket, throwing the catches and attaching the plugs with motions so fast they’re a blur to Gaara’s eyes. It takes a moment for all the wiring to come back online, but seconds later he’s flexing his false fingers and reaching for Gaara once more. 

This time, the nanites part to let him in.

Gaara cannot say why he allows it. He only knows that now, when Lee’s artificial finger strokes down his palm, he misses the warmth of Lee’s bare skin. 

“Where do you keep your bandages?”

“I don’t.” 

Lee rolls his eyes, puerile and dramatic. “Fine, then. If you insist—” 

He lifts his wrist to his mouth and bites down on the fabric there. A strip comes off his sleeve with a _rip_ that drowns out the thud of Gaara’s pulse in his ears. Lee holds up the makeshift bandage with the same defiance as Tenten did the scrap of her cloak, back on the planet’s surface. 

“You’re ruining your clothes.”

“Then I’ll mend them. Here.” 

Lee’s fingers are very careful on Gaara’s palm, his touch surprisingly delicate for someone whose hands are so broad, whose fist Gaara just saw plunge straight through a man-eating creature’s throat. But he does not shy away from the contact either, as he wraps Gaara’s palm thoroughly. He tucks the wrapping under itself, and then he runs just the tips of his fingers underneath the knot on the back of Gaara’s hand, testing its tightness. 

The touch is so light that Gaara shivers. 

And then Lee does something Gaara would never have thought to expect. 

He bows his head, and he presses a tender kiss to Gaara’s bandaged palm. 

“There,” he says, folding Gaara’s fingers back in, looking up into Gaara’s eyes with his dark gaze sparkling. His cheeks are warm with that familiar bronze, the color deepening to a blush. 

Gaara can still feel Lee’s lips on him, hot as if Lee had kissed him with no barrier at all. As if he had pressed his lips to Gaara’s open, bleeding veins. 

“Is that … what they do on Earth?” Gaara’s voice rasps out of his throat. 

“Hm?” Lee’s thumb is rubbing over Gaara’s nailbeds, still holding his hand up between them like some kind of sacrament. 

“Like the touching, and the hugging. Is it an Earth thing?” 

Lee meets Gaara’s eyes for just one more moment, and then his gaze strays down and away. 

“No,” he says. His tongue darts out, pink, to wet his chapped lips. “Just a _me_ thing.” 

“Oh,” Gaara croaks. “Thank you.” 

Gaara’s stomach rolls over, and he has the spinning, weightless feeling of dropping off the watchtower, the vertigo of the moment just before the nanites catch him. He’d thought he’d done away with these flights of fancy, quashed any foolish surges of emotion in the face of the outsider’s strangeness, his unfamiliar culture and far-too-familiar ways. 

But right now … right now all he wants is _more_. 

Lee sets Gaara’s hand gently on his own knee, then goes about detaching his prosthesis again and plugging it in to charge. It takes everything Gaara has not to reach for him. Not to grab him by the hand and say _Wait. Do that again._

“Don’t think I’m not still mad at you,” Lee mutters, more to the electrical socket than to Gaara.

Of course he is. 

Of course he is, because the nature of the outsiders’ culture is _fundamentally incompatible_ with Suna’s. But they have no choice, either of them. They’re stuck with each other now. The outsiders are part of Suna, by choice or by necessity, and they will have to adapt … or they will have to perish. 

Gaara won’t apologize, so instead he says, “I didn’t know your arm could do that.” 

“What?” Lee glances up at him, brow furrowed. There’s a beat of bemused silence, then, “Oh. The launcher.” 

Gaara nods, mute.

“Of course you didn’t,” Lee says bitterly. “You’re so focused on what we _can’t_ do that you haven’t even stopped to think about what we can.” 

“What?”

That ferocity is back in Lee’s eyes, all the tenderness of the moment before washed away in the wake of his ire. 

“Did you know the twins are defense specialists?” He leaps topics like he expects Gaara to follow him, his voice hard as forged steel. “Both of them. They’re faster than me in close combat and stronger even than Sakura. In a fight, you wouldn’t want anyone else at your back—daylight _or_ night.”

“Are they?” 

“They are!” Lee’s voice is much too loud for the tiny space, the pace of his words quickening, his accent coming out thick and prominent as he barrels on, “But you didn’t even think to ask, did you? You took one look at their eyes and started guessing. Like because they can’t do things exactly the way you expect, that means they can’t do anything at all.” 

“I didn’t know—” Gaara starts to say.

“No,” Lee snaps. “You didn’t. Your _subjects_ went down some default checklist and then just started putting us in boxes. You’ve got Chouji working in the kitchens—which is great, fine, he loves it—but do you know what else he can make? His family manufactured poisons and medicines. He could revolutionize your entire defense system _and_ your pharmacy, if you’d thought to just _ask_.”

“We can—”

“ _You_ can stop making assumptions based on half-formed information and your own biases.” Lee’s eyes are ablaze now, like twin solar flares burning, bringing the sandstorm of his rage right behind. “You don’t even _know_ us.”

Gaara could say quite a few words about presumptions of competency, but he bites down on the rancorous words that urge at the back of his throat. His mouth snaps shut, and he nods. Drops his chin and stares at the red splotch spreading through the thick canvas of Lee’s sleeve wrapped around his palm.

Because Lee is right. 

He doesn’t know the outsiders at all.


	5. Artificial Intelligence

“How’s the ship coming along?” Yamanaka asks, idly twirling the hair at her temple. She and Haruno are seated across the mess table from Gaara and Lee, practically in one another’s laps and completely ignoring their food. 

Gaara would almost think to be jealous, if not for the loud smacking noises coming from the man next to him. Lee is shoveling the hearty potato curry into his mouth like he hasn’t eaten since the last harvest. There’s a rim of orange grease all around his bowed lips that he keeps licking at every few bites. His tongue is still that tempting pink. His lips, still chapped from his chewing on them in spite of the adequate hydration guaranteed by Suna’s diet.

Gaara looks away, closing his eyes as the piercing pain just behind his left eye lances him once more. It’s been like this since he entered the mess hall, sharpening every few minutes and then subsiding to a dull ache. If it keeps up like this, he really will have to go to the medical unit, as much as he disdains imposing upon Suna’s limited clinic. 

He resolves to focus on other things, like the half-inch of space between his hand on the bench seat and Lee’s thigh. Lee’s dressed in his Earth clothes again, and the fabric of his trousers is so well-worn that Gaara can make out the shape of the muscle beneath. 

His pinky shakes like it’s going to do something he hasn’t given it permission to. He balls his hand up into a fist. 

“Slow,” Temari says with a sigh from Gaara’s other side, leaning forward to prop her elbows on the table. “Way too slow.” 

“We’re making good time,” Nara admonishes her, shooting a sharp look across the tabletop. “We’re hauling back nearly as much material now as we were before the twins got pulled off rotation.” 

The Hyuuga twins have been reassigned to Kankuro’s patrol since the day they proved their unsuitability for the ship work, and now they strictly operate during the tunnel’s night shift. Gaara was reluctant to permit the change, initially. The comms channels have remained dominated by prattle about the rogue band of outlaws, whose stature has been elevated in the chattered rumors to _pirates_ now, much to Gaara’s amusement; and by increasingly dire tales of the pending solar flare. There is, therefore, little demand for additional guard shifts. 

… Or so Gaara thought, until the twins had staged an ambush of Kankuro’s hand-selected night patrol. They’d picked them off one-by-one over the course of a single evening, leaving them hog-tied in the mess with their actions not discovered until morning.

They were lucky that their stunt wasn't interpreted as a gesture of hostility. But Gaara accepted Hyuuga Neji’s smugly detailed report on the blind spots of the patrol routes with what he likened to grace, and what Kankuro likened to ‘a face like the guy just shat in your muesli’. 

In either case, Kankuro has supplied nothing but rave reviews regarding the twins’ performance ever since. In fact, his eye has taken on a particular shine when delivering his weekly security report—one that Gaara sees the mimic of on his sister’s face when Nara is being particularly snide or persnickety. Though the fact that the Hyuuga are always discussed as a unit has left Gaara without a clue _which_ twin it is that has captured Kankuro’s affections. 

“It’s just more delicate work,” Nara wraps up a tedious explanation of the precise details of the last stages of the dismantling of the ship, to Temari’s rapt attention and the rest of their tablemates’ indifference. 

“I can’t say I have much of a taste for _delicate_ ,” Temari drawls, propping her chin on her palm. 

Nara smirks at her. “No, I wouldn’t guess you would.” 

“Oh, gag,” Yamanaka mutters. “So! Gaara.” She turns to him with a gleam in her eye. “How much longer d’you think it’ll be before they’re all done?”

Gaara shrugs, diffident, blinking back another pulse of pain. The timetable for the completion of the project has changed so many times at this point that he hasn’t a clue which estimate is most current, and the piercing headache isn’t helping his recollection any. 

“As long as they’re finished before the sandstorm.” 

“Sandstorm?” Lee asks through a mouthful of root vegetables.

“There’s a solar flare predicted to erupt soon. Those generally trigger sandstorms.” 

A sandstorm, while harrowing, poses little risk to the village so long as they batten down the tunnel entrances ahead of time. But there are still certain preparations to be made. This latest promises to be quite the event, its timing particularly auspicious.

“Sounds peachy!” Gaara doesn’t know how to read Yamanaka’s tone; her fingers are still twined around the blonde strands at her temple, giving the effect of either vapidness or _playing at_ vapidness. It's disarming. “I know Sakura’s just _dying_ to get her hands on your, uh, what did you call it, hon?” She bats her eyes in Haruno’s direction. “ _Antique_ medical equipment?” 

Another stab of pain throbs through Gaara’s skull. He winces, grabbing for his head as if the pressure of his palm might stop the way his eye is beating like a second heart.

Lee’s hand is on the side of his face in an instant, cupped over the back of Gaara’s knuckles. 

“Are you all right?” 

He hasn't touched Gaara so intimately since he wrapped his wound, and that is now a thick and shiny scab. His palm is so very, very warm. Gaara nearly leans into it, biting back a hiss.

“Pig, stop it!” 

Gaara hasn’t a clue if the epithet is a nickname, a term of endearment, or an earned title. 

“Just a second, I’ve almost— _ouch!_ ” 

An insult, he settles on. Definitely an insult. Because when the pain eases enough that he can open his eyes and look up, Haruno has the skin of Yamanaka’s hand locked in a bruising pinch, yanking it away from her temple and pulling no small amount of her hair with it. 

“What … is she doing?” Gaara rasps. 

Like a flower loses its petals, the pain falls away degree by aching degree, until it’s subsided entirely. 

Yamanaka huffs, throwing her arms across her chest. Her lower lip juts in an exaggerated pout. 

“I was just reading your bio-markers, sheesh! Everyone down here is so _touchy_.” 

“And I _told_ you already that their biology is different enough that you could really hurt someone doing that!” Haruno snaps. 

“I was only curious.” Yamanaka turns her head with a dramatic toss of her long hair. 

It’s only then that Gaara recognizes the exact timeframe of the onset of his headache. It hadn’t begun when he entered the mess hall, but when Yamanaka brought her fingers to her temple. He recalls Uchiha, the very first day the outsiders arrived, mentioning the enhancement in Yamanaka’s brain. He’s given it very little thought since, Temari’s reports suggesting that whatever weak monitoring capacity it might have was likely to be uncalibrated to the Sunan body, and therefore of little use from an information-gathering perspective. Something that could possibly be considered for adaptation in the future, but nothing that presented as a priority, or an immediate threat.

Apparently she’d been mistaken. 

Gaara’s throat sinks into his stomach and makes a foul, uneasy little nest there. He swallows back a tide of threatened bile.

There’s nothing wrong with him anymore, he reminds himself. Nothing that can be tested for. Councilwoman Chiyo had been very firm about that. There should be nothing of interest for Yamanaka to see. 

He _hopes_ there’s nothing for her to see. 

“Say—” Yamanaka turns back to look at Gaara, a sly smile creeping at the corners of her mouth. “Do you have some medical condition you haven’t told us about?”

Gaara’s eyes go wide. He’s no longer aware of Lee’s hand, still gently cupping his even though it’s fallen from his face. All he can feel are the icy fingers of panic crawling up his windpipe. Even Temari has ceased her flirting with Nara to stare, frozen, at the words falling from Yamanaka’s lips. 

“Pig—” Haruno says warningly. 

Yamanaka snaps something back in the Konohan dialect, of which Gaara only understands the words _Shut it_. 

“Did you know your heart rate is unusually fast?” Yamanaka asks, snide. “Everyone down here has a very slow pulse, but your heart has been absolutely _racing_ almost the whole time we’ve been eating. Actually …” She cocks her head, and her grin grows wicked in a way that has Temari growling. “... it’s been like that ever since Lee sat down.” 

Gaara’s body nearly collapses under the relief. Is that really all she sensed? Perhaps he truly has outgrown his childhood frailties. 

Although … 

He spares a glance at Lee, who’s frowning in consternation, and then his eyes dart just as quickly back to the tabletop, evading Yamanaka’s gleeful gaze. He tugs his hand from beneath Lee’s and nestles it in his lap.

Perhaps it is some sort of disease or disorder, to be thrown for such a giddy loop by a man who apparently hasn’t noticed that he has half a spoonful’s worth of rice on his cheek. 

There’s a choked, muffled sputter from Gaara’s left. A hiss and a squeak as a metal hand balls up into a fist. 

“Ino!” And then Lee is standing, the full height of him, glaring across the table. “You’re being very unkind right now.” 

They are among the harshest words Gaara has ever heard Lee speak, his tone underlain with the same steel and fire as their fiercest arguments. 

Nara puts up a calming hand. “She’s only teasing, Lee. Don’t get your drawers in a wad.” 

“Is she?” Temari’s hand is at her shoulder, as if to grip the strap of the wind cannon she isn’t currently carrying. “I must have missed the joke. What part of that was supposed to be funny?”

Nara gapes at her, open-mouthed and gobsmacked.

“Uh, the part where your brother has a massive, ridiculous—”

The bench’s feet shriek across the floor as Lee pushes it back, and the four other occupants with it. 

“I just remembered I need to charge my leg,” he announces, fists flexing. He levels his crewmates with a glower of such ferocity that Gaara nearly jerks away from him just to avoid being caught in the blast radius. “Gaara, can you please let me into the room?” 

“I …” Gaara stumbles to his feet, shoots a longing glance at his half-eaten bowl of curry. “Sure. Just let me clean up.” 

Temari lays a hand overtop of his bowl when he grabs for it. There’s a strange sort of look in her eyes, at once keen and oddly vulnerable.

“Go on,” she says in a low voice. “We’ll take care of it. Won’t we, Shikamaru?” 

“Um, yep. Sure.” Nara grabs Lee’s empty bowl and stacks it beneath his own. “Gotcha covered. Go, uh, charge up.” 

“Thank you.” 

Lee bows very stiffly, and then Gaara’s scrambling to keep up with his long strides as he exits the mess.

  


* * *

  


“I’m sorry she did that,” Lee says, shutting the door behind them. 

Gaara thought the claim of needing to charge his leg a mere contrivance, but Lee proves true to his word, unbuttoning the side of his pants to get at the attachment on his hip. In the gap between the two halves of fabric, Gaara can see the metal outlining his hipbone, how it brackets his pelvis and vanishes into the small of his back. 

“It’s fine.” It’s become a familiar refrain in light of Lee’s frequently unnecessary apologies. 

And truly, it _is_ fine. Yamanaka did no lasting damage, and Gaara’s relief at her having discovered nothing more than the biological evidence of his silly little infatuation with the man who shares his room is so palpable he could almost smile. 

He sits down on his bed, looking away as Lee finishes the detachment process at the desk and gets everything plugged in, his pantleg gaping loose until he ties it up. It’s only polite. And perhaps if he keeps his eyes fixed on the mattress, the blush heating the back of his neck won’t give him away.

Lee uses the desk chair as a crutch to hop back to his cot, sinking down onto the thin mattress with a sigh.

“It’s just—I know that you’re uncomfortable with … all of this.” He gestures at the narrow space between them, the alley of the stone floor less than a meter wide. 

“I’m not uncomfortable.” 

“You are not nearly as good a liar as you think you are.” Lee clicks his tongue, and the look on his face is one of such martyrdom that Gaara wants to cross the room and shake him. “You looked like you were going to vomit. I’ve never seen you look so _pale_. And that’s saying something!” 

“I’m not uncomfortable _now_ ,” Gaara clarifies. It’s mostly the truth. Any lingering discomfort he feels now is solely attributable to the memory of the strip of scarred, brown skin just over Lee’s metal-capped hipbone, and the fact that their shared room means Gaara has no space or privacy to purge that mental image. 

“Ino was completely out of line,” Lee says. “I’ll talk to her. Or, better yet, I’ll talk to Sakura, and Sakura will talk to her.” 

“It’s _fine_ ,” Gaara reiterates. “What’s done is done. You’re not the only one who can let something go.” 

Lee doesn’t hold a grudge, he’s told Gaara, and so far this has proven to be true. Although their first fight was far from their last, after each one he’s gone right back to treating Gaara as if the argument never happened. And either the rest of the outsiders have resolved to follow his lead, or Lee hasn’t mentioned how many nights they stay up past lights-out, hissing heated words in the space between their beds. 

But despite this grace that isn’t quite forgiveness, Gaara still feels an uncertain pressure. Like Lee is _expecting_ something of him. Like he’s waiting for Gaara to _change_. 

He’s looking at Gaara now with frank skepticism. It’s a fair reaction. Gaara has certainly given him little cause to believe that he can move on from a source of disagreement. Gaara is much more liable to fall asleep irritated and wake up with a rebuttal on his lips, and the first morning he’d awoken after an argument to find Lee smiling beatifically at him had been jarring. Learning to accept Lee’s motto of ‘today is a new day’ has been … an adjustment, to say the least. 

Whatever disbelief Lee is harboring, he lets it drop, turning his attention instead to the pack under his bed. 

“Hey, Gaara?” 

“Yes?”

“Did I ever tell you about my papa?” 

It’s an invitation, Gaara knows. An extension of an olive branch. Lee only ever speaks of his father in allusions, offhand comments that are just as likely to bring a tear to his eye as a smile to his face. He has a great number of sayings that he attributes to the man, and _Papa always said …_ has become a familiar refrain. All told, though, Gaara knows very little about Lee’s father. He knows that he spoke the same language of the books that Lee reads, that he was a revered expert in some discipline, and that he had very particular moral values. 

“Not much,” Gaara says cautiously. 

Lee sits up with a wrinkled piece of paper in his hand. He smooths it against his leg a few times, and Gaara recognizes it as a photograph, creased and faded at the edges. There are no cameras on Kaze—they would be both an unthinkable luxury and a waste of precious materials—but Gaara knows of them from mentions over the interplanetary comms lines and from a few of the preserved books which have not yet crumbled to dust, with their true-to-life depictions of various items of interest. 

“This is—” Lee goes as if to stand up, his lone leg wobbling. “Oh. Hang on, and I’ll—”

“I’ll come over there.” Gaara jumps to his feet as if the nanites themselves picked him up. “It will be easier.”

“I’m perfectly capable—”

But Gaara has already crossed the room, and he plops down on the cot right beside Lee. The weight of their bodies on the bed’s weak frame makes it bow, and they slide together until their hips and thighs are touching. 

Gaara takes a shaking, steadying breath. Lee’s uninjured leg is warm just like the rest of him, and Gaara can feel the muscles twitching in his thigh as he adjusts himself, getting comfortable. 

“Well,” Lee says, holding the picture out in front of him. “This is him. It’s the only picture of us I have left.” 

The photograph is of a much younger Lee and a much older man, his skin wrinkled and weather-beaten, his dark hair gone grey at the temples. They have their arms around each other, wearing matching green jackets and matching ear-to-ear grins. The resemblance between the two of them is unmistakable, particularly around the browline. 

“Wait,” Gaara says slowly. “I thought you said your father wasn’t your biological parent.”

“He wasn’t!” Lee’s smile now mimics the photograph almost exactly, true and delighted. “It’s just one of those coincidences. Funny, isn’t it?” 

It’s more startling than funny, Gaara thinks, looking down at the photo’s browned and crumpled edges. They look like the same person captured at two moments in time, but for Lee’s features being slightly finer. 

Lee strokes the corner of the photograph with his thumb. 

“This was taken right before he got sick,” he says, wistful. 

For all that Gaara doesn’t mourn his own father, he understands at least on an intellectual level the grief that follows the loss of a parent. Even those whose elders survive long enough to take themselves walking are given time alone with their sorrow in the aftermath. 

“Did you … have to leave him behind?” Gaara asks. “When you left Earth?”

Lee shakes his head, a little ruefully. He opens his mouth, closes it again. Exhales through his nose so hard the paper ruffles. 

“Everything is poison back on Earth,” he says. “The water, the air … even the dirt. Nothing _grows_ there anymore. It’s all manufactured. And there’s only so long you can survive on chemicals and pills.” 

He’s chewing his lip again, Gaara notices. Hard enough that the chapped skin is starting to split. He almost wants to lay his fingers upon Lee’s mouth to make him stop.

“Papa hated that sort of thing. He was always sneaking out of the safe zones and getting into things he wasn’t supposed to. He would say he wanted to return to more natural ways of life, that humans weren’t designed to live cooped up in plastic bubbles, that we were meant to commune with nature.”

Lee’s eyes are welling up with tears again, but Gaara doesn’t want to move away from him even for the time it will take to grab the handkerchief. So instead he offers up the corner of his sleeve, dabbing it at the water escaping Lee’s eyes. Even his tears are warm.

“Thank you,” Lee snuffles. “Sorry. The point is, he _loved_ the world … but the world didn’t love him back.

“I … I don’t know, maybe this is too philosophical, but I think Earth might be too ruined for that. Like, if any planet was capable of love … it wouldn’t be Earth. Not anymore, at least.” 

Gaara thinks about the books on his desk, about the bestiaries and almanacs with their delicate ink drawings, the lines upon lines of text carefully printed to detail all of Earth’s wonders. There was, at one time, something of _love_ on Earth. Before humanity stripped it of that, took everything they could of its bounty and then fled. Is it possible? That mankind could have broken the planet entirely, could have made it loveless?

“I don’t think it’s too philosophical at all,” he murmurs.

Lee’s eyes are still fixed on the photograph. 

“It started in his bones.” The words come from him like water slowly dripping through a crack in stone. “His feet, first. Then his legs, his hips. Eventually he couldn’t walk anymore, and that—” His voice breaks. “It took away a lot of the things he enjoyed. A wheelchair can’t exactly scale a fence or wade through a sewer. Goodness knows he tried it, though.”

“Is that—” Gaara is about to say something terribly indelicate, but the question burns him too fiercely for him to hold it back. “Is that what happened to you? Did you … try to give him your leg?” 

Gaara knows precious little about the capacity of Earth medicine, but clearly it’s capable of far greater feats than the meager medical equipment of Suna. 

“Some sort of—” He waves his hand aimlessly in the air. “—transplant?” 

The smile Lee shoots him is crooked. 

“That’s … not how that works.” He rubs a hand down his face, stretching all his features in its wake, smudging the teartracks there. “But I would have given it to him if I could. Heck, I would’ve given him _both_ of my legs.”

He ducks his head.

“Ah, pardon my language.”

Gaara brushes the concern off with a brief gesture. 

“I would have given _anything_ ,” Lee says. “Anything at all. But—” His jaw clenches, and a muscle in it works for several silent seconds. When his voice emerges again, it’s gone high and tight. “They wouldn’t let me. They wouldn’t even _check_ to see if I could be a bone marrow match for him, because the risk of me having some sort of reaction to the drugs was too high! _Me!_ Like I was worth more than he was.” 

There’s a warning creak, and Gaara only barely snatches the picture from Lee’s hand before his metal fist crumples it. 

“Thank you,” Lee breathes, turning his head away. It seems an act of great effort for him to unknit his brow. His body relaxes only by degrees. “I _hated_ them,” he whispers. “I’m sorry, I know that’s a harsh thing to say, but—” 

“No,” Gaara interrupts, “no. It makes sense.” Of all the frankly insane things Lee says and does, this one, at least, Gaara thinks he understands. 

He knows quite a bit about _hate_.

But there is still something he hasn’t quite grasped …

“ _Them_?” 

“The people in charge of the project,” Lee replies. “The scientists. Orochimaru and the rest of our _keepers._ ” He cuts the air with that word like a knife slits a throat. 

He looks up at Gaara, and his wet eyes are so dark. The kind of black that atrophies your optic nerves if you stare at it for too long. 

“I’m sorry,” Lee says. “I know you probably don’t really understand—back there, it isn’t like things are here—but … they could have saved him. They could have saved him,” he repeats, and this time it’s a whisper. “And they let him die.” 

He shakes his head with a bitter little chuckle. 

“Oh, I didn’t mean to be so negative! I was trying to distract you. I apologize.”

“Stop.” Gaara’s fingers twitch like they want to touch something he isn’t supposed to. “You apologize too much.”

“S—” Lee catches himself before the word can leave his lips, smacking them closed with an ironic smile. 

Gaara hopes the smile he gives back makes Lee feel half as warm as his does. 

“You … asked about how I ended up with all this.” Lee holds his hand up and flexes the metal joints illustratively. They’re freshly oiled, shiny in the humming light. “Do you still want to know?” 

“Yes.” The word escapes Gaara before he can think better of it. “Of course.” 

“After Papa—Well,” Lee bites the sentence off at the quick. “ _After_. I was _so angry_ I …” He trails off. 

Gaara simply waits for him to continue with patient stillness. Lee’s body is warm next to his, and he finds himself inching ever-closer. 

“Sorry—I mean. Um.” He glances at Gaara, desperate and flustered. “Cripes. You’ve really set me a challenge!” 

“Good,” says Gaara. “It’s a skill you could do to learn.” 

“What skill?” 

“Not apologizing for things you have no fault in.”

Lee’s upper lip twists. “Because you’re such an expert, Mr. I’ve-never-said-sorry-my-whole-life.”

“I’ve apologized,” Gaara retorts. “But only when I mean it. When you say something all the time, it loses its potency.” 

“I do n— _rrgh!_ ” Lee grits his teeth. “You can be so _frustrating!_ I wasn’t even trying to argue with you!” 

“Carry on, then.” Gaara beckons for Lee to continue. “You were about to tell me a story.”

“What I was _about_ to say is that this isn’t a happy story,” Lee corrects him. “And that we could talk about something more lighthearted if you’d prefer.” 

“No.” Gaara cocks his head, intrigued by Lee’s careful phrasing. “I want to know.” 

“As you like.” Lee tips his chin down, and he’s looking at some distant point on the floor when he finally continues. “It’s like I said. I was angry. And young. And … very lost, without Papa’s guidance.” 

Gaara can picture it. A teenaged version of that same ferocious, willful Lee that comes out under pressure or threat, alone in the world and raging against the powers that made him that way. A perfect recipe for poor decision-making. 

“I never got around to telling you what Papa’s specialty was,” Lee says. “The whole reason he was even chosen as one of the parents for the project.”

“Which was?” Gaara presses, fully invested now. 

“He was a martial arts expert. A master of four different disciplines. He’s the one who taught me how to fight.”

“You didn’t mention you knew how to fight,” Gaara points out. “You said you didn’t have any skills.”

“I don’t fight anymore.” Lee stretches and flexes his metal fingers with those familiar little hisses of released air. “It would be too easy to lose control and really hurt someone.” 

Gaara has never experienced a fight that _wasn’t_ to the death. But Lee has been out of Gaara’s depth almost since this conversation began and he’s only sinking quicker, so Gaara holds his tongue. 

“But back then,” Lee continues. “I … didn’t really care. And I knew all the escape routes out of the safe zones.”

“That’s why you’re so good at evading traps.” It all clicks into place. “And memorizing journeyways.” 

Lee nods with a soft noise of affirmation. 

“And, well …” There’s a little light in Lee’s eyes now, one that has nothing to do with tears. Like the twinkling of foreign stars. “If there’s one thing Earth has no scarcity of, it’s violence.” 

“Violence?”

“Underground prize-fighting. No holds barred, any weapons allowed except firearms, all enhancements welcome. I wasn’t really after the prize money, though. I just wanted …” Lee kisses his teeth. “Adrenaline is a powerful drug, you know? I didn’t even mind losing, because at least the thrill of the fight felt better than anything else I was feeling.” 

This is not the heroic backstory Gaara’s been envisioning. The foolish, grandstanding, self-sacrificing ethos Lee embodies—he sees where it comes from now. And it’s not from always having been some Earth brand of perfect, idiotic virtuousness. It’s from being thwarted. From being _wounded_. 

“You can get pretty messed up in a fight like that. It was nothing like fighting in the dojo with Papa and Neji. There aren’t any rules and there isn’t any referee. There’s no tapping out. The fight stops when the first person gets knocked out …” Those dark eyes shift, as if he’s weighing what to say next. “... or _taken_ out.” 

And this, too, Gaara can picture. Lee in some dim, subterranean space, fighting tooth-and-nail against men much more well-equipped, much more hardened than he would have been. Getting beaten down and coming back for more with the very same doggedness with which he now pursues their little tiffs, with the same fire in his eyes that leads him to question Gaara’s orders and defy his commands. 

“I got hurt _a lot_ ,” Lee explains, gesturing to his empty hip socket. “But every time I got injured, they would patch me back up. Even when I thought I’d done something irreparable. There would be some new equipment, some new surgery. They just … wouldn’t let me self-destruct.”

“Because you’re too valuable,” Gaara says.

Lee huffs. “That’s certainly what _they_ thought. It almost got to be a competition at the end, there. I sort of … this is selfish of me, but I kind of thought … if I went far enough, they might see how wrong they were.” 

“Huh.” For all that the notion of such waste makes Gaara nearly ill, there’s a twisted sort of logic to it. The kind borne of desperation. 

“I think the heart would have been the final straw if it hadn’t been for us leaving.”

Somehow, Gaara doubts that. 

“I’m surprised they outfitted you with such advanced weaponry, if they didn’t want you to keep going out and fighting.” 

“Hm?”

Gaara gestures to his own upper arm, miming it flying off like a bullet. 

“Ohh! Oh, no, these aren’t my original prosthetics,” Lee explains. He flicks his metal forearm and it makes a sound like a ringing bell. “The first ones were pretty plain and boring, actually, real hospital model stuff. I didn’t get all the bells and whistles until Shino kitted them up.”

“I thought Haruno was your surgeon,” Gaara interjects.

“Sure, but she’s no weapons designer.” 

“And Aburame is?” Gaara is shocked. “You said his specialty was insects.”

“On _Earth?_ ” Lee stifles a laugh behind his hand. “There weren’t any to specialize _in_. Bugs are just … something he really, really likes. His passion, I guess.”

Gaara falls into a contemplative silence, mulling over this revelation. 

“We could use weapons,” he offers, after a moment. “Perhaps he’d be better suited to—”

“Oh, _don’t!_ ” Lee begs. “Don’t use that against him, please. He’s so much happier helping things grow than he ever was making things that kill. He’s … really a gentle person.”

Gaara can admit that there is a stark difference between the Aburame of the public areas and the Aburame of the gardens. In the mess hall, Aburame is stiff, near-mute, communicating only in mumbles and moving only in slightly alarmed jerks. Hyper-reactive, Gaara would say. Sensory-defensive. But in among the beehives and the compost bins, he softens. Gaara has overhead him calling the drones by names that he has given them, each one unique.

“It’s … I mean, it’s like Ino, right?” Lee says, when Gaara doesn’t offer a response. “She’d much rather be tending longbeans and marigolds than acting as our therapist.”

“She’s a psychologist?” 

“By training,” Lee clarifies. “Child and adolescent developmental psychology. You think she had that sensor put in her brain by choice?”

Gaara opens his mouth to say, _Yes, actually. She certainly seemed to relish making me squirm with it._ But before he can quite find the diplomatic version of that sentiment, Lee goes on:

“They expected her to be a nursemaid.”

And that, Gaara agrees, is very hard to imagine. He cannot picture Yamanaka as anyone’s nurse _or_ their maid. 

“Just like they expected me to be—” The words get choked off as Lee dissolves once more into tears. His shoulders are sunken, heavy with the weight of expectations placed upon him before he was born. 

For all that he is a man of titanium, right now he seems so fragile. So vulnerable. 

It’s only when Gaara moves to touch him that he realizes he’s still holding Lee’s family photo. He seizes it as the only workable distraction that might stop him from doing something truly rash. 

“Who’s this other man?” There’s a figure in the corner of the photograph that Gaara’s only just noticed. Nearly out of frame and more shadow than light. Only identifiable as a person by his mop of gray hair. 

Lee straightens up with a wet sniff. 

“Oh, that’s Kakashi. Papa’s partner.” 

It’s a word with meanings as myriad as there are grains of sand on the surface of Kaze, but the way Lee says it is heavy with a certain inference. 

“But not your …” Gaara stalls, the word catching on the back of his teeth. The common tongue does not have a single word that encompasses what the relationship would be called in Sunan. Two adults of the same gender, joined in romantic partnership, both parents to a child. Father and ... 

“Second … father?” he attempts. “Step-father?” 

There’s a moment where Lee just blinks at him, looking faintly nonplussed. 

“Oh no,” he says. “That would never have been allowed. Papa and Kakashi's relationship was …” His lips twist, searching. “… not public knowledge.” 

_Bewildered_ is a good word for what Gaara’s feeling right now. The only question he can think to voice is, “Why?” 

Why would a simple romantic relationship need to be kept a secret? And _not allowed?_ How would anyone even presume to have authority over whom a person chose to associate with?

“It might have given us ideas,” Lee laughs, a sort of disbelieving chuckle. “Our parents couldn’t have biological children, but they were still expected to set an example for us. About what sorts of relationships were appropriate. When you have a, um …” 

He’s back to chewing his lip, fidgeting with the bedcover. The blanket twists up into a little hillock under his anxious fingers. 

“They called it ‘the moral imperative of reproduction’. That’s probably the closest translation I can give you, at least. When you have that kind of … requirement, certain ideas are dangerous.” 

“Like being in love with another man,” Gaara posits.

“Yes.” Lee’s voice wavers. “Among other things.” 

Lee is decidedly not looking at Gaara’s face right now. Their legs are still touching, but it feels like there’s an ocean of space between them, a gulf as vast as Kaze’s desserts, as empty as long-abandoned tunnels. 

Lee is the one with the artificial heart, but it’s Gaara who feels heartless just now. Because Lee’s _moral imperative_ —the whole reason he and the rest of the Konoha Twelve have even come to Suna—means that whatever nebulous tension has been simmering between them can never be properly resolved. No matter how casually or gently Lee touches Gaara, or how meaningfully his gaze might linger. No matter how many nights they lay awake in the dark with scant feet between their bodies, sharing whispered words that do not carry over into the morning light. No matter how many crushing, one-armed hugs Lee gives him, nor how many warm and tender kisses he presses to Gaara’s wounds.

“That wouldn’t be an issue in Suna,” Gaara blurts, and immediately curses himself for his reckless mouth. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what Suna’s mores are, because Lee is from Earth. And he’s carrying around all the baggage of his absurd, reproduction-focused culture, when Suna doesn’t even have the _resources_ for a scheme like the one Lee and his crewmates are committed to enacting.

“I’ve noticed,” Lee tells the wall. “I’m actually not sure if everyone else has, yet.”

Gaara is stricken by this statement. How could any of the outsiders possibly not be aware of something so blatant? He supposes it’s such a nonissue that perhaps no one has brought it to their direct attention, but even so. It’s certainly not something it would occur to any Sunan to _hide_. There’s no shame in selecting a spouse of the same gender, or one with whom childbearing is impossible—in fact, there’s a certain honor to it, to those who choose to contribute to the village alone, imposing no more than their own needs. Haven’t the outsiders seen these couples eating together in the mess, living together, sleeping together? For the Bank’s sake, Uzumaki is housed with Baki’s daughter and her wife. Surely he must know that their marriage is no secret.

“Sakura knows for sure,” Lee adds pensively, his gaze still distant. “So I think Ino must, too.”

Gaara frowns. It’s not clear if Lee is trying to imply something by that, or if he’s just making his usual loose associations. 

“You all are much more reserved than we are,” Lee continues. This much is an understatement. “But if you look around, it’s obvious who the couples are. I just haven’t said anything, because I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.”

“What do you mean?”

“There aren’t a lot of families with children here, are there?” Lee goes on as if he either didn’t hear Gaara’s question or he’s ignoring it. 

“Ah—” Gaara has the utterly wrongheaded thought that he wishes his nanites weren’t back on his bed, because he’s struggling to keep up with Lee right now. “We can only sustain a replacement rate of the population.”

For all that childless unions aren’t uncommon, there are also plenty of couples in the village who _could_ have children. Plenty who want to, even. But it is not always in the best interest of the village to do so, and a family’s desires must be carefully balanced against the village’s capacity. Children take up space, and food, and most of all _attention_ and _time_. Time that will necessarily draw their parents away from their work, putting further strain on Suna’s scarce resources, even with dedicated caregivers and teachers to supervise them during the day. Contraceptives and abortifacients are among the most common items in Suna’s medical stores as a result, and most women keep very close track of their ovulation cycles. 

“Couples who want to have children have to get permission from the council,” Gaara explains, “and then there’s a waiting list.” 

Lee is watching him with a very strange expression. It’s the same look he wears when he’s encountered a particularly troublesome word in one of the ancient books, one that doesn’t lend itself well to interpretation into Common. 

“I realize that’s likely incompatible with your aims, but that’s the way things have to be.” Gaara’s tone goes pointed and clipped. “For the survival of the village. If you and … whoever among your crew it is that you’ve chosen as your _partner_ wish to have children, that’s the process you will have to follow.”

Lee’s jaw drops. “But I don’t—”

“You should take your picture back.” Gaara shoves the glossy paper back into Lee’s hands. “Before it gets damaged further.”

“Oh.” Lee accepts with gentle fingers, but he looks … almost hurt by Gaara’s brusqueness. As if Gaara has not always been just as terse as he is in this moment. “Okay.”

He bends down awkwardly, pulling away as his balance shifts from Gaara’s body and onto his single leg so he can duck under the cot and pull his pack back out. He tucks the photograph into the front pocket, smoothing it reverently before he zips the pack closed once more.

Gaara should take this opportunity to stand and leave, but he doesn’t. And when Lee sits back up, the motion of his body jogs the cot’s wobbly legs and makes the mattress buckle. 

“Whoa!” 

Lee’s arm goes out to catch himself, and his hand plants right behind Gaara’s back as their bodies are jostled back into each other’s.

Suddenly, their torsos are nearly crushed together. Their faces are so close they’re sharing breathing room.

“Oops,” Lee says, and his voice comes out husky. 

His cheeks have gone that flushed bronze again. Gaara can see every crease, every crack of his chapped lips. The faint shadow of peach fuzz on his jaw. 

Lee’s eyes are on Gaara’s mouth, too. 

His hand comes up, and cool metal fingers cup the side of Gaara’s face. There’s a hiss from his wrist, and Gaara can feel the air puffing from Lee’s hydraulics as his thumb strokes Gaara’s cheekbone. 

Against his better judgment, Gaara slips a hand around the back of Lee’s neck, up into that silky hair. 

He closes his eyes against the blinding dark of Lee’s gaze … and lets Lee kiss him. 

Gaara wonders if it’s strange, that two such disparate cultures should express affection with this identical gesture. Is there some instinct, coded into the human genome, that craves the touch of one’s lips upon another’s?

Lee’s lips are softer than Gaara would have expected from the roughness of his skin. The touch of them is very gentle. He keeps his mouth closed. 

Gaara is on fire all the same. 

His stomach has gone to war with his heart, and the nauseating swoop of terror in his gut is doing battle with the frantic drumming of his pulse. Lee’s good hand is on his waist and there’s a thumb caressing his side and Gaara is lost. He’s lost. This is probably a mistake, but it might just be the best mistake that Gaara’s ever made. Lee’s breath is sweet and his mouth is warm. So terribly, wonderfully warm. 

Some wild impulse drives Gaara to bring his other hand to Lee’s hip, and this is the motion that ends it. His movement throws off Lee’s precarious balance, rocking him. Their mouths come apart with a gasp. 

Gaara’s panting as if he’s run all the way from the gardens without his nanites to assist. His hand comes up to his lips as if by touching them he might preserve the feeling of Lee’s mouth on his. 

Lee’s fingers trail down from Gaara’s cheek to rest upon his chest.

“Your heart is racing.”

Gaara is certain that it is.

“What about your moral imperative?” he whispers. 

Lee licks his chapped lips, leaves them shiny-wet. 

“Haven’t you ever done something—not because it was the thing you were supposed to do, but because you wanted it?” Lee breathes. 

“No.” Not before just now. “Why did you—?”

Lee shakes his head, slow, and his hand fists in Gaara’s shirt to pull him back in again. 

“I wish I could tell you,” he murmurs into the gap between their mouths, and then he closes it.


	6. Experimental

The solar flare erupts just after the last load of ship parts is hauled in. 

Gaara is standing in the engineering quarters, surveying the breakdown of its component pieces. The ship looks larger like this, a disorderly mess strewn all across the room that has only just begun to be sorted. The engineering room is one of the largest in the tunnels, due to the size and complexity of the equipment within, but that doesn’t mean it’s especially spacious. Presently it’s overcrowded, between the swarming engineering crew and the heaps of scrap metal. 

On the surface, all that remains of the Konoha ship are its most useless artifacts: brittle, artificial stone whose replacements could much more easily be quarried on Kaze, seats stuffed with foam now dried nearly to dust by the planet’s heat and wind, the cracked plasticine sheets that served as the ship’s windows and which are hardly even worth a comparison to the finely blown and ample glass of Suna. Gaara doubts any of it will remain once the sandstorm blows through, and any final bits of debris that get scattered across the planet’s surface will just as soon be repurposed by the native animals. Digger Mites can carry many times their weight in material and seem particularly attracted to brightly colored scraps of human waste, incorporating their variegation into their spiraling mounds in patterns that can actually be quite beautiful, if one has the eye for it. 

But deep beneath the earth, even the outermost patrols have come to shelter inside, Suna hunkered down for the approaching storm. The tunnels’ entrances are blocked quite thoroughly, heavily sealed by their stone doors and the gaps further daubed with muddy sand to keep any ambient wind and electromagnetism from sneaking underground. There is no safe view to the surface during a flare, not unless one wishes to be blinded, and so the only sign that the event has even transpired is the crackling in Gaara’s earpiece as the external communication network goes dead. 

He takes the earpiece out and puts it in his pocket. The international comms will be restored to functionality soon enough without any effort on Suna’s part. And in the meantime, there is much work to be done. 

It is perhaps an hour into the laborious organization of the ship parts when the wind picks up and begins to howl. 

Its mournful cry is echoed by the Sunans, one by one through the tunnels, raising their voices to join the wind’s song. 

“What is that?” Lee asks, gently setting down a piece of the ship’s console and wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. 

He cuts a fine figure there, against the fogged glass of the wall lights, shadowed by the hulking castoffs of the now-ruined ship. The posture exposes the curve of his flexed bicep, the line it draws down the side of his chest to his narrow waist. The outsiders always strip their surface gear off as soon as they get underground, and Gaara has not yet found it fit to tell Lee how utterly inappropriate it is to expose so much skin, even within the tunnels. The golden shades of Lee’s bare arm are such a temptation that it almost causes Gaara, humming along with the wind, to forget to explain. 

“The sandstorm’s here,” he interrupts the tune to explain. “Councilwoman Chiyo’s going walking.” 

Gaara passes Lee his cloak as they follow the rest of the engineering staff out the door, all of them singing, save for Lee.

All up and down the tunnels, the Sunans are setting aside their tasks, closing the doors to their rooms and filing up into the main hall. 

All three rotations of kitchen staff have been hard at work through the night, and they stream from the mess now with their arms overloaded with a bounty of dishes, the smell of the food drifting temptingly down the tunnels. In truth, the so-called feast is no more ample than a traditional Sunan meal, but these dishes are particularly time-consuming in their preparation, and there are certain spices that are rare enough that they are only used in times of great celebration. 

At the head of the whole procession hobbles Councilwoman Chiyo, supported under one arm by her granddaughter Ameno and under the other by her brother Ebizo. Her steps totter only slightly, but the villagers’ footfalls are slow in her wake, keeping respectful pace with her deliberate gait. While there is no cause for any individual Sunan to own elaborate clothing just for special occasions, the family of honor has been ritually bathed and outfitted in the communal ceremonial robes. 

In the main hall, Gaara lingers in the back of the crowd with Lee. Though he catches a few glances—as he always does on walking days—he pays them no mind. He may be the village leader, but this is neither the place nor time for any attention to be spared towards him. The entire focus of the ritual is upon the family and the one going walking, as it should be. 

Scattered among the crowd are the rest of the Konoha Twelve, looking far less bewildered than Lee does. Akimichi marches in with the kitchen crew, a tureen of stew clasped in his thick arms, rumbling a deep bass note. Kankuro is clustered with the rest of the trap-setters and defense squad, a Hyuuga on each side, all of them wearing expressions of suitable somberness as they add their voices to the song. Yamanaka and Aburame stand abreast with the gardeners, and Inuzuka is in an alcove with his host family’s toddler daughter on his hip. Even Uzumaki’s usually jabbering mouth is round in the wind’s song, though Gaara suspects this may have something to do with the fact that Uchiha appears to be pinching the back of his neck. 

Across the hall, Temari stands with Nara’s hand brazenly upon her arm—although, given their new public status, Gaara wonders if it might be time to switch to calling him the more informal _Shikamaru_ , the way the outsiders do. Gaara arches a questioning brow at her and she shakes her head stiffly to indicate _later_. 

Gaara supposes he must be the only one of the hosts to have neglected to mention the pending ceremony to his Earth-born guest. 

He has been busy. 

And Lee has been very distracting. 

Tunnel nights are long, this time of the harvest year, only growing longer as the temperature underground drops. The ample stretches of darkness lend themselves to more talk, to more debate. And to more of … other things. 

The rooms also become quite chilly when the lights go out, and two shared blankets are warmer than one. Gaara’s bed is slightly larger and more comfortable than Lee’s cot, and with Lee’s prostheses taken off to charge, he doesn’t take up particularly much of the bed’s width at all. He has said that he doesn’t mind the fact that his toes hang off the end of Gaara’s short mattress when he stretches out. But while Gaara is no engineer, he spent quite a bit of time experimenting until he found the perfect configuration of the tangle of their limbs so that they both fit upon it perfectly. 

Perhaps he hasn’t been sleeping quite so well as before, if only for the surge of adrenaline brought on each time Lee’s bare skin brushes his. His heart thrums every time Lee, wrapped around him, shifts his warm, muscled arm. He nearly ceases breathing at every warm smack of Lee’s lips against the crown of his hair. But the sacrifice of the quality of his sleep and the privacy of his bed is worth it. 

It’s wonderful, waking up to being held. Dangerous, in that it makes Gaara want things that he has trained his whole life not to want. Things like staying in bed an extra hour after the morning lights come up to kiss lazily under the shelter of double blankets. Like skipping the vital nutrition of breakfast in favor of warm fingers slipping up under his sleeping tunic to stroke the bare skin of his stomach, a sensation so exquisite Gaara could lose days to it. Like wasting the charge of the nanites to rush him to the Seed Bank in the mornings, because he spent too long tearing himself away from Lee’s embrace to arrive on time by walking at a reasonable pace. 

This selfish desire can be allowed, he tells himself, so long as it does not interfere with his duties to the village. 

So far, it has not.

Gaara suspects that it is only a matter of time until it does. 

But the joy is so achingly sweet in the meanwhile. 

Lee’s hand—his dominant one, the metal one—is touching his shoulderblade just now, very gently. Nobody is looking at them to notice the impropriety, as Councilwoman Chiyo and her family ascend to the room’s central dais.

Lee cranes his head down, his breath warm on Gaara’s ear to whisper, “What are we supposed to be doing?” 

“Just sing along,” Gaara parts his lips to murmur back. 

Lee doesn’t get the tone quite right, his high voice just slightly out of key as the sound in the room rises. But his airy voice is drowned out just like Gaara’s tuneless hum, as the song spirals up into the domed ceiling, until the room is resonant with it. Until every chest is thrumming with the echo of that vibration. 

It is Ameno who begins the melody. She steps forward upon the dais, raising her hands and dropping her jaw. The sound that comes out is piercing, keening. The stone walls tremble with the haunting wail, and all around the room, more voices join it. Each citizen adds their notes, their memories of Councilwoman Chiyo to their lament. The notes Gaara hums now speak of her stern guidance, her keen eye for danger, her surprising gentleness in the wake of the choices his father made. All across the floor, eyes are slipping closed against unwelcome tears, throats are vibrating with ululation, fisted hands are raising in supplication, in sacrifice. 

On the dais, Ameno’s eyes are dry, trained upon her grandmother’s face. 

The song rises, and rises, and rises until it can rise no more, until any further volume would bring the tunnels down around them all. 

And then, it ends. 

The outsiders are the last to fall silent, just a beat too late. 

Councilwoman Chiyo bows her head. 

She turns, and then steps through the secret door that leads up and out of the tunnels. 

“Where is she going?” Lee hisses. 

Gaara barely turns his head to reply, “Out.” 

“In this storm?” His hand tugs, insistent now, on the back of Gaara’s cloak. “Isn’t that dangerous?” 

“It’s honorable.” 

As would be expected of any Sunan councilmember—any respectable Sunan citizen—Councilwoman Chiyo has made the only dignified choice. To walk out onto the planet’s surface during a sandstorm, on her own two feet, under her own power. She has been slowly declining for a long time, her faculties fading. It is not always so clear when it has come time for someone to go walking, especially one who typically makes the judgments regarding others’ suitability to continue to contribute to the village, but with Councilwoman Chiyo the course has been blessedly clear. Her once proud stride has deteriorated to a shuffle, her balance not what it once was, the acuity of her eyesight diminished. She has become a liability. 

And so, rather than waiting until she was so debilitated that her family would be forced to kill her—to smother her in her sleep, most likely, as has been the preferred, kinder method since the days of Gaara’s father, when resistors would be dragged kicking and screaming to the tunnel entrances and tossed out into the storm, the doors locked until the noise of their pounding fists faded—Councilwoman Chiyo has nobly gone walking while she still can. 

On the dais, the councilwoman’s family are shedding their ceremonial robes. They turn the sand-white cloth inside-out, revealing the soft lining in the dusk-grey of mourning. They depart silently from the hall, the crowd parting to let them go. From here, they will ascend up to the watchtower, and from within a glass bubble they will watch their mother’s, their grandmother’s, their aunt’s and their sister’s last steps until she’s swallowed up by the sand. 

“When … when will she be back?” Lee whispers, disbelieving. 

“She won’t.” 

Gaara is, after all, the only person in Suna’s history to have returned from going walking. An incontrovertible death sentence, survived only by the auspicious discovery of a stone shelter and the last, lingering charge of his nanites, which had buzzed around him for far longer than he’d thought they’d last. At the time, he’d attributed their longevity to miracle, the beneficence of his mother’s spirit, a final gift to her youngest child, born prematurely, weak of body and weaker of mind, unstable and unwanted. Dehydrated and delusional, he even thought he’d heard her voice—her voice which he could not remember hearing—in the nanites’ hum, whispering, _Go home_. 

Of course, he knows now that it was only the friction of the sand in the air sustaining their electrical charge. 

His return had been heralded like the resurrection of a ghost. With wariness and superstition and no small amount of awe. 

His father had been put out and Gaara installed in his stead shortly thereafter. 

Lee, of course, knows none of this. 

In the present, Lee’s hand is resting on the small of Gaara’s back, turning them into an alcove so he can speak without whispering. Behind them, the rest of the hall is queueing up at the banquet tables, waiting for their plates to be loaded with braised vegetables and enriched doughs and aromatically spiced rice. The cornucopia provided by the joint occurrence of the season’s last harvest and the feast of a walking ceremony is a particularly auspicious sign. 

“I thought Councilwoman Chiyo was your head doctor,” Lee mutters urgently. “Why would you just let her walk off like that?”

“Elder Chiyo,” Gaara corrects him. “She’s an Elder now. And she walked because she still could. If she had waited until the next sandstorm, she would have been too weak to walk out on her own.”

“And that’s … that’s what you do with old people here?” 

“And the debilitated, the defective, and the terminally ill,” Gaara amends. “Anyone who can no longer contribute the equivalent resources required to sustain their lives.”

“That’s so _disrespectful_.” Lee’s voice sounds horrified. 

“On the contrary, it is the highest form of respect.” 

“You have a funny idea of respect,” Lee retorts. “Back on Earth—”

“This isn’t Earth,” Gaara reminds him. “Would you rather we let them waste away, draining the village’s resources until we all starve?”

Lee narrows his eyes to glare at him. “I was saying,” he says hotly, “that back on Earth we were expected to _care for_ the sick and the elderly until they passed away. Naturally.”

Gaara just stares at him, unimpressed. It defies any logic. A person ill or declining is inevitably a person in pain. And to allow them to remain in that state, when there are so few medicines within Suna’s stores to ease that hardship, seems an unthinkable cruelty. And that is not even to mention the unfathomable strain such a notion would put on the village’s resources itself—the food, the water, the time spent in caregiving.

“There were an awful lot more of them than there were young, healthy people,” Lee goes on, his accent coming in thick like it does when he gets particularly impassioned. “Of course it was our responsibility.” 

“Perhaps somewhere with sufficiently advanced medicine and plenty of food to spare,” Gaara accedes. “Here, it would be nothing short of suicidal. Devoting so much time and effort to those who can’t hope to return the investment. It’s a waste of resources.” 

Apparently sensing that his version of a humanitarian approach is having no impact on Gaara, Lee switches tacks. 

“You’re always talking about resources,” he says. “Isn’t knowledge a resource? That’s why you’re so possessive about those books, isn’t it?”

Gaara dips his head in acknowledgement.

“Well, there’s so much _wisdom_ in a person who’s lived a full life,” says Lee. “Our elders have so much to teach us. … How could you just let that kind of knowledge go? What if—what if someone gets sick and she was the only one who knew the cure?”

“She’s passed that mantle to her granddaughter.”

Elder Chiyo spent the last days of her life sequestered with Ameno, herself a trained and skilled medic, imparting upon her the last of her essential knowledge so that she may take her grandmother’s place as the head of the village’s medical unit.

“Whatever secrets Elder Chiyo knew,” Gaara explains, “Ameno carries them now.”

“But …” Lee’s bowed little mouth purses into a frown. “What if she forgot to tell her something?”

Gaara turns, shrugging, and leads Lee to the end of the queue that has grown much shorter, most of the villagers already scattered around the hall and tucking into their meals. 

“Then it’s lost.” He inhales deeply of the steam drifting off the earthenware dishes and lets it out on a sigh. Turmeric, cardamom, coriander, the sweet starch of root vegetables and caramelized onion. The meal promises to be delicious. “There is no energy to spare on the helpless.”

Lee falls silent behind him, and as they move to the head of the line Gaara thinks the conversation must be over, until—

“But you take care of babies, don’t you?” Lee grabs for Gaara’s elbow as if words wouldn’t be enough to draw his attention. “Babies are pretty helpless.” 

“Children, correctly reared, will eventually grow up to be useful contributors,” Gaara corrects him, shifting out of his grip when the woman piling his plate with rice examines their physical contact with scrutiny. “Their development is worth the investment of resources because their trajectory is towards greater productivity, not less.” 

“But you can’t possibly know that for sure,” Lee argues, a piece of bread being placed upon his own plate. “Not for every child. What happens if their _trajectory_ doesn’t go the way you expect?” 

With the departure of the now-ascended Elder Chiyo’s family from the hall and the two of them walking away from the table and into the hall proper, many eyes have returned to Gaara. How easily they forget between walking ceremonies, in the illusion of his competence, what he once was.

Deficient.

Defective.

Gaara had returned from his battle with the sandstorm a changed young man. When his bloodied fingers had at last wrenched open the farthest escape hatch, his first breath of the tunnels’ familiar air had felt as if new life were seeping into his lungs. He no longer felt the fear that had plagued his youth, no longer did the panics of his childhood stalk the corners of his mind. He stared down at the blood dripping from his shredded fingertips, and the only thing he felt then was a sort of peace. 

The first thing he had said, when Kankuro found him, his scraped-raw body collapsed against a tunnel wall, had been, “I’m hungry.” 

He could not remember his weak body ever having felt proper hunger before. But suddenly he was ravenous. Not just for food but for knowledge, too, for companionship, for _love_. He was overflowing with a sort of gratitude to his harsh planet, to his strict culture, to the very people who had sung him out into the desert and forced him to prove himself. 

Councilwoman Chiyo had examined him then and declared that if he had survived three days in a sandstorm— _three days,_ Gaara could scarcely remember or believe it—that whatever physical or mental frailty he contained within him was obviously no hindrance to his survival or the village’s.

And while the breakdowns that had led to his walking had not ceased, not entirely, they had become less frequent, more private. 

“There isn’t anything wrong with you,” Councilwoman Chiyo had told him, and he repeats those words to himself even now, when he finds himself on a precipice. 

Gaara returns Lee’s questioning gaze with a flat stare. He could tell Lee, easily, _exactly_ what happens to children who are not thought capable of future contribution. 

However, his silence seems to successfully convey the answer Lee doesn’t want to hear.

Lee’s fingers drift to his mouth in shock. His wide eyes grow wider, suddenly teary. 

Gaara resolves to distract him. This evening is, after all, a time of celebration. 

He gestures Lee back to the little alcove, where they can stand and eat in relative privacy.

“The dancing will start soon,” he announces to Lee’s still-stunned silence. Even in his dismay, Lee has cleared his plate with typical speed and enthusiasm. 

“Dancing?” Lee mops sauce from the corners of his plate with the final corner of his bread and pops it into his mouth. “I love to dance.” 

Bells have begun to be rung from the edges of the hall, and Gaara sets aside Lee’s plate to lay a hand upon his arm.

“I thought you might,” he says, with all the warmth that Lee’s skin imbues him with. “Come. I’ll teach you a few steps.”

  


* * *

  


With the disassembly of the ship concluded, the Konoha Twelve have been assigned to new tasks. 

Lee had flatly refused to join Kankuro’s defense patrols. 

”I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he’d said, and ignored all of Gaara’s arguments that in so refusing he would possibly bring harm upon a much greater number of people. Their debates upon the matter had stretched through several days and nights, and by the end of it Gaara had been so exhausted—and so irritable from sleeping alone in his bed, Lee having returned to his cot in his disgruntlement—that he’d finally thrown up his hands. 

“Fine,” he’d told Lee. “Just find some way to make yourself useful. I don’t care what it is.” 

And so Lee ended up apprenticed to Tenten, who apparently was formally trained as a metalsmith of some description. Suna’s lone smith, accustomed to much smaller payloads of metal, was quickly overwhelmed by the scope of the work to be done. But Tenten’s knowledge was surprising in both its breadth and depth, and as so many of the outsiders have proven to be, her skills have been instrumental to their success. So now Lee passes the bulk of his days in physical labor down in the forge, shredding the various ship components and melting them down to be reformed into objects of use. 

The project is both labor-intensive and time-constrained, because the furnaces can only run so long per day without overheating the tunnels’ delicate climate control. As a result, Lee returns sweaty and smoke-streaked to their rooms much earlier each evening than he did when he was ferrying ship parts off the surface. 

He’s resumed sleeping in Gaara’s bed since his job assignment was accepted, and their blankets now smell of his soot. The scent of him has become a comfort to Gaara, who finds himself ceding the last minutes of a workday that would have been spent hunched over the transcriptions on his desk to Lee’s sweat-scented embrace, to the press of breath-warm kisses at his temple. 

The evenings after dinner now pass with the two of them crouched knee-to-knee on Gaara’s bed, which has space for them both when the desk does not, translating the books in Lee’s father’s language, page by painstaking page. It is impossible, with Lee so close, not to want to inch closer, and too many times they have had to stop themselves kissing before one of them loses balance and falls atop the book between them. 

This is the position they find themselves in tonight, so lost in each other that the book they were meant to be translating has been put aside on the floor. Gaara’s nanite pod is occupying the desk’s charging port, which means Lee has two hands to wrap around his waist right now, a leg to balance on and a knee to urge Gaara further into his lap as they kiss. 

There’s a certain desperation to their movements this evening, an undertone of desire that has come increasingly to color their interactions, an urgent sense of _more_. When before the slip of Lee’s fingers up the hem of Gaara’s shirt was enough to send him undone with overstimulation, somehow now it feels like not enough, and Gaara’s body is wracked with something he has no name for. It’s too powerful to properly be called a _want_ any longer, and though he knows it cannot possibly be a _need_ , it certainly feels like one. Like he’ll die if Lee stops doing exactly what he’s doing right now, but also like he’ll dissolve into oblivion if Lee goes no further. 

Just being in Lee’s lap—being held by him, touched by him, kissed by him—no longer satisfies. Having even skin to separate them is unbearable. Gaara wants to be with him, to be _within_ him. If he could open up Lee and climb inside right now he would. 

The door hisses open, and before the two of them can fly apart, Temari’s voice is barking, “Gaara!”

He scrambles off Lee’s lap backwards across the bed and makes it virtually nowhere, because there’s hardly any space to go. 

She stares at him, quietly shocked, for just a half-second before she shakes herself.

“Come quickly.” Her voice is brittle with panic. “It’s Kankuro.”

Gaara grabs his nanites off the desk so quickly he unseats the plug from the wall, and its cord trails behind him as he snaps on his gloves. 

Then they’re flying down the tunnels, Gaara’s speed bolstered by his nanite cloud so he can keep up with Temari’s frantic pace. It’s only when they’re halfway to the medical unit that Gaara realizes Lee’s uneven footsteps are following behind, the clunk of one metal foot on stone alternating with the silence of his bare foot’s tread. 

Gaara hears the screams the moment he turns the corner onto the medical hall. 

There’s blood everywhere, great streaks of it, soaking down into the pale stone but still freshly shining. 

It has been quite some time since Gaara last saw this much blood. 

He does not allow the panic to grip him.

_There’s nothing wrong with you,_ he reminds himself, and what he means is, _You can handle this._

Within the medical bay, Ameno is staring at Kankuro’s mangled body with eyes bulging with shock. Behind the gurney stand the Hyuuga twins, their identical faces blood-spattered and grim, their palms red with Kankuro’s blood. Kankuro’s head is twisted into the pillow, all the cords of his neck straining. There’s a wad of cloth stuffed in his mouth that hardly muffles his pained screams. And although he has yet to be stripped for triage, still dressed in the black suit of the night patrol, his pant leg is twisted, shredded, soaking wet and not from water. 

The shape of it can hardly even be called a _leg_ , anymore. 

“What happened?” Temari gasps, stepping backwards from the carnage so hastily that she bumps into Gaara’s nanite cloud. He has to catch her with his own hands before she falls, and as he pushes her upright, he can feel her whole body shaking.

“We were surveying one of the abandoned tunnels when part of the roof collapsed,” Hyuuga Neji reports all in a single breath. 

“Th-there must have been a n-n-nnnn- _nest_ of Stone Suckers nearby,” Hyuuga Hinata wrenches the words out of herself like a poison being extracted, “because everything was all c-c-crumbled.”

“The combination of the wind and the vibration from our footsteps must have been just enough to shake it loose,” Neji adds. “Because one second we were just walking down the tunnel, and then the next—”

“He _screamed_ , and—”

“Well?” Temari snaps, rearing on Ameno. “Why are you just standing there?” 

Spurred into action, Ameno turns from the gurney, searching through the cupboards of the room with frantic clatters, as if the plasters and gauze wraps in Suna’s paltry medical stores might do anything for damage of this scale. Finally, she returns with a pair of tempered glass shears, and with these she cuts up the side of Kankuro’s pant leg. 

Beneath, the sight is only worse. Kankuro’s kneecap is crushed and twisted, his calf already the mottled purple of compartment syndrome. The bone of his femur breaks the skin of his thigh in an open fracture, blood gushing with every gritted moan he exhales.

“Tourniquet,” Ameno mutters, almost to herself. “Right.” 

She grabs a length of rubber tubing from a nearby counter and raises Kankuro’s leg to snap it around the limb. 

Even through the gag, Kankuro’s responding scream shakes the walls.

“I’m so sorry,” she squeaks. 

Watching the whole gory proceedings, it dawns upon Gaara that it has fallen to him to ask the needful question. He looks up from the rictus of his brother’s face to stare at the twins. 

“Why did you bring him back?”

“We weren’t going to _leave him_ ,” Neji snaps, as if the very notion were barbaric. 

“You should have,” Gaara replies, as Kankuro’s body twitches and spasms. “There’s nothing for him here, now.” 

“We thought that S-s-s-ssssss- _Sakura_ might be able to—”

“What could your medic possibly do when Suna’s—”

“Doctor,” comes a sharp voice from behind them. Haruno stands in the doorway, her shock of once-pink hair with its roots grown out dark brown now, snapping on a pair of gloves. “I’m a doctor. Now let me at the patient.”

She elbows a stiff, unmoving Lee out of the way and strides into the tiny space like she owns it. From her posture alone she seems the tallest person in the room. She passes a cursory eye over the bloodied mess and without a blink looks up at Ameno and says, “Good tourniquet work.”

“Thank you,” Ameno whispers.

Her steely eye snaps to Gaara and Temari. “I won’t be able to save the leg. Definitely not below the knee, and probably not much above it either.”

“C-couldn’t you replace it, though?” Hinata pipes up to stammer. “Like with Lee’s—”

“I could. If I had anything to replace it with.” Haruno’s already in motion, snatching the scissors from Ameno’s numb fingers and cutting away the rest of Kankuro’s clothing, tossing them in a bloody heap upon the floor. “Grab me some wet cloths and sanitizing pads,” she commands, as if Ameno is merely her nurse. “Gotta see what I’m working with here.” 

With the blood wiped away, Kankuro’s skin is unnaturally pale. He’s beginning to shiver, and his screams have fallen silent. 

“He’s lost a lot of blood. You have fluids?” She directs the question to Ameno. 

“Just saline solution.”

“It’ll have to do. Get ‘em warm and get a line going, we can’t let him lose any more volume or go into shock.”

“Wait.” Gaara holds up a commanding hand, but Haruno doesn’t even pause, packing gauze into Kankuro’s wound, tightening the tourniquet. “If he’s going to be defective … if he can’t contribute—”

“Sorry, no can do.” Haruno does not sound particularly sorry as Ameno returns with a bag of saline. “Hold this—” She passes the bag to Hinata. “Sit up there—” She points to the counter. “—and keep it warm. Don’t squeeze it.” 

A moment’s fiddling with a large-bore glass needle, and then she’s looking up at Gaara again.

“Like I was saying. I took an oath. I don’t just let people die because they’re gonna be missing a limb when I’m done with ‘em.” 

“You said—” Temari gasps out, desperate. Gaara is not looking at her, but her voice is caught, choked and wet with tears. “About the prosthetics. Gaara, if he can get one—”

“It takes months to fit, mold, and craft a functional prosthetic limb, and longer to train to use it,” Haruno declares, not looking up, still steadily folding gauze. “Longer since we haven’t even started building the infrastructure to make them here. We only just started really taking the ship apart. You willing to wait that long? With him not being able to _contribute_?”

“It would be unprecedented,” Gaara begins. “There’s no system in place for long-term care for someone in that condition. I don’t know—”

On the bed, Kankuro’s head thrashes. He spits the cloth from his mouth, and it hits the blood-soaked floor with a wet _splat_. 

“Told ‘em …” he mumbles in Sunan. “Gaara …” 

“I’m here.” Gaara steps closer to the bed, and Kankuro’s eyes fix hazily upon him. 

“Told ‘em to leave me,” he slurs, his gaze foggy with pain. “Jus’ put me out, g’won.”

“Stop it …” Temari murmurs, coming to stand between her brothers. Her eyes are red-rimmed and glossy and she reaches for Kankuro’s death-pale shoulder with trembling fingers. “You stop that right now. There’s a doctor right here, and she’s going to—” 

“Y’know better,” Kankuro interrupts her, voice slow. “Y’gotta. ‘S for the village. Tell ‘er, Gaara.”

Gaara cannot say a word. Although Kankuro’s putting on a brave face just now, one look in his eyes tells him that under the excruciating pain, his brother is scared. _Terrified_. 

He lays a hand on his brother’s sweating forehead. The skin there is clammy. 

“Kankuro …” 

“Won’ even make ya sing me out,” Kankuro offers the pale echo of a joke. “Sorry I won’ be comin’ back like he did, T’mari.” 

Temari chokes back a noise of distress, and Gaara raises both hands, summoning the nanites up and under Kankuro’s body.

“Just what do you think you’re doing to my patient—!”

“Wait!” Lee’s voice is so shrill that Gaara freezes. 

The whole room turns as one to look at him. Even Kankuro’s head lolls in his direction. 

“Sakura, you said you can save him, didn’t you?” 

She stands back and crosses her arms. “All he needs is a simple amputation.” 

“We’re about the same height, aren’t we? Kankuro and I?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with—” 

“Give him mine.”

Gaara’s head jerks around so fast he nearly gets whiplash.

“You said that wasn’t how it worked.”

“Not my real leg,” Lee replies. “The prosthetic. He can have it.” 

Temari outright sobs this time. 

“You realize if you do this—” Gaara’s heart is in his throat. “—you’ll be the one sent out instead?” 

“I very much doubt that.” Lee shoots him a smile that’s at odds with the grisly scene before them. “After I first lost my leg, I got around just fine on crutches. I’ll figure out a way to make myself worthwhile, I promise you that.” He makes that rude Earth gesture the outsiders seem so fond of, the extended thumb pointed towards them, one eye scrunched closed in a wink. 

Gaara is not so sure that Lee isn’t just feeding him platitudes so he can continue his foolhardy trend of self-sacrifice. Whatever the case, the temptation to accept—to save his brother from certain death—is immense. It goes against everything Gaara has ever known. To have one of their primary defense experts out of commission for the amount of time it will take Kankuro to recover leaves the village in a very precarious position indeed. And if Lee is unable to keep his end of the bargain, the village is worse off with him staying. That selfish part of himself that Gaara has slowly been cultivating is raging within him now. As a matter of village security, the decision is difficult. But as a matter of Gaara’s personal _feelings_ … the choice becomes impossible. 

He shuts his eyes tight against the pain of what he’s about to say.

“We can’t just give Kankuro special treatment because he’s my brother.” 

It’s something Gaara’s father would have accepted in a heartbeat. It’s the whole reason Gaara lived long enough to walk out into that sandstorm and right back in again. Given chance after chance after chance as Rasa’s son, despite his continued failure to thrive. 

“It’s not special treatment,” Lee says firmly, lifting his chin high in the air. “I would offer it to anyone.”

“Good luck convincing the rest of the villagers that,” Temari mutters, though all her typical dry wit has been stripped away by a tremulous sort of vulnerability. 

“Once Sakura has the equipment to make more prosthetics,” Hinata pipes up, in a voice that is not nearly so shaky anymore, “it won’t be special treatment anymore.”

“Perhaps you could consider this … an experiment,” Neji adds. “With Kankuro as patient zero.” 

“And if the experiment fails?” Gaara asks, the words scraping out of his throat like a sandstorm has parched him. 

Haruno shrugs, already scrubbing her hands in the sink. “Then you’re in no worse a situation than you are right now. And Lee gets his leg back.” She turns, snapping on a fresh pair of gloves. “So am I doing this amputation or are you gonna have to fight me out of this room?” 

Gaara looks down at Kankuro’s face, his gritted teeth. Up to Temari’s tear-streaked face. Over his shoulder to Lee’s determined gaze. 

He turns back to Haruno and nods. 

“You may proceed.” 

“Well thank you ever so much for your generosity,” she drawls, sarcastic. “Ameno!”

“Yes ma’am?” 

“You have anaesthetic in that pharmacy of yours?”

“Um.” Rustling as Ameno paws through the stores. “Only mild painkillers and topical analgesics.” 

“And no sterile surgical suite either, I’m guessing.”

Ameno shakes her head mutely.

“Great. Luckily I love a challenge.” 

She turns to look back at the assemblage of bodies in the room. 

“Guess who just got volunteered for surgical nurse duty!” she announces with false cheer. “That’s right, all of you. Gaara, you have poppies in the gardens?”

“Yes?” he replies, puzzled.

“Great, take Temari and go grab as many of them as you can spare. And Lee?”

“Yes, Sakura!” 

“Run down to the forge and get an iron poker. Hot as you can make it, and then book it back here.” 

“Yes!” He’s out the door in a flash.

“The rest of you, you’re on restraint duty.” There’s a sharp ferocity in her gaze that reminds Gaara of nobody so much as Lee. “I’m going to have to cauterize.”

  


* * *

  


“Gaara,” Temari groans softly. They’re kneeling side-by-side in the darkened gardens, filling the basket between them with poppy blossoms. “The villagers aren’t going to like this. Even if Kankuro …” She breaks off. “What are we going to do if he ends up being defective?” 

Gaara counts the remaining blossoms under his breath. The poppy crop has been bountiful this year, and there’s plenty of seeds left in storage. If they leave just twenty, that should be enough to restore their population by the next harvest. 

“I’ll find a way to make it work,” Gaara mutters, more to himself than to Temari. “We can find a place for him. We have to.” He says this last emphatically, as if by speaking it he might make it true. 

“This is all because of …” This time of night, the only light in the gardens is a single, silvery overhead bulb, meant to mimic the Earth’s moon. Temari swallows, and it’s by this pale light that he sees the knot of her throat jogging. “... because of what I saw you all doing when I walked in, isn’t it?” 

“No,” Gaara protests. 

He feels, deep in his heart, that Lee was telling the truth when he said he would have offered himself up like this to anyone. It’s utterly consistent with everything that Lee has shown himself to be. 

But Gaara’s decision to go along with it … No. It’s not only because it’s Lee. And not only because it’s Kankuro, either. There are words rebounding around his head right now, dizzying him. Echoes of midnight arguments and heated whispers. A desire to be kinder. Hopes for compromise. Dark eyes on him, watching him, waiting. The expectation of change. The pain of the choice of village over individual, when it’s no longer himself he’s making the choice about. 

In the end, it all comes back down to Lee, doesn’t it? 

“Yes,” he admits. “Temari, I can’t just—”

The last head of the poppies severed, Temari climbs to her feet, brushes dirt off her trousers. 

“I sure hope you know what the hell you’re doing.” 

Gaara emphatically does not. He follows her up, only stumbling slightly on his numb knees. A gesture of his hand, and then the nanites are buffeting them both airborne, sailing them through the door to the gardens and locking it behind them.

“You realize we’re gonna have to do this for everyone, now?” Temari asks, the air whistling in their ears. 

“Yes,” Gaara replies, definitive. “And we _should_.”


	7. Space Pirates

It is nearly two weeks before Lee is cleared to leave the medical unit. 

Gaara arrives to collect him only to discover the halls uncharacteristically busy with people. At least a dozen Sunans are bustling around the hallway, clearly feigning that their tasks have brought them here all at once, because their eyes keep drifting from the baseboards they’re pretending to dust or the cart of linens they’re pushing all too slowly to the door of the largest sickroom. 

“Get back to work, all of you,” Gaara snaps, and the hall clears in an instant.

He cannot say he blames them. The story of Lee’s sacrifice and Kankuro’s experimental procedure have spread through the village like all gossip does down in the tunnels: quickly and with a vengeance. Rumors and speculation have been swirling like a miasma, coloring all conversation like Kankuro’s blood still stains the stone of the hallway. And word that today is the day one of their number is due to be released has traveled fast. 

As the nanites set him down, the door swings open.

Inuzuka comes busting through it, trailing a gaggle of chattering children. Clutched in each one’s hands—Inuzuka included—is a small wooden figure, four-legged and floppy-eared. Gaara squints for a long moment before he recognizes the shape of the creatures from his books. They’re dogs, the domesticated canines that were once a popular housepet on Earth.

“What do we say, guys?” Inuzuka calls over his shoulder. 

“Thank yooou!” the children howl in chorus. 

“Oh, hey, Gaara!” Inuzuka notices him and greets him as if he is an old friend, although they have hardly spoken. “Didn’t mean to hold ya up! Lee’s waiting for ya. He’s dying to get out of there. Thought Sakura was gonna have to tie him up.” 

The comment about Lee _tied up_ sends Gaara’s mind in directions it would rather not go when a bunch of toddlers are milling about his feet, knocking their wooden dogs into each other and making growling noises. 

“Thank you for the information,” he says stiffly. “I’ll just … be going inside now.” 

“Cool, cool,” Kiba says, apparently either unnoticing of or unphased by Gaara’s discomfort. “See ya around!”

He strides off, the children yipping and scratching in his wake. Just before Gaara closes the medical unit door behind him, he realizes some of the children have dropped down onto all fours to race each other up the hall. It’s hardly an appropriate manner of comporting oneself in public, but Gaara can’t bring himself to say anything. Instead, he hides the hint of an amused smile behind his hand. 

“Gaara!” Lee practically springs up from the room’s second cot, grabbing a wooden crutch from the end of the bed and hobbling across the room with far too much speed and enthusiasm for someone who just underwent major surgery without anaesthetic. “Is it really time to go? I’ve been going crazy cooped up in here! Sakura wouldn’t even let me get out of bed to do push-ups!”

He’s already fully dressed in his Earth clothes, the empty left leg of his trousers tied up in a knot like when he’s charging his prosthetic. Although, Gaara supposes, it is no longer _his_ prosthetic. Not anymore. 

“Just a moment,” Gaara holds out a hand to pause him, turning to the figure on the bed nearest the door. “Kankuro.”

“Hey squirt,” Kankuro says tiredly. 

His brother’s procedure was significantly more invasive than Lee’s. While Lee underwent a simple removal of existing equipment and a fair few stitches, Kankuro has experienced an entire realignment of the nervous system of the lower half of his body. He’s had nerves removed, reformatted, reconfigured and reseated. That’s in addition to the installation of the new hardware of his hip socket, which has not yet even been hooked up to the prosthetic leg that sits now beside his bed. His convalescence is expected to last quite a bit longer before he’s even able to attempt to use the leg. 

“How have you been doing?”

The blanket spread across Kankuro’s lap is covered in scraps of wood and fabric. He has a row of glass needles tucked into the collar of his medical smock, a line of tacks between his pursed lips. In his hands he’s holding a glass screwdriver and a jauntily clad doll, tightening one of its wooden screws.

“Eyebrows over there ain’t kidding,” he sighs. “This cabin fever thing’s no joke.” 

“So you’ve been making …” Gaara gestures to the mess on Kankuro’s lap. “... toys.” 

“Puppets,” Kankuro corrects, holding the little wooden figure up and demonstrating how it bends its limb when he pushes a lever on its back. 

Gaara recalls Kankuro’s fascination with the marionettes in the nursery, back when they were children and toys were an appropriate pursuit. He could make them do all sorts of spectacular things—complex dances, intricate staged battles—when Gaara could at best cause them to flop an arm or leg patternlessly, and Temari much preferred to slam them against each other until they nearly broke and blame any damage they may have incurred on Kankuro. 

“You’re making _puppets,_ ” Gaara amends. 

“Yeah, figured if I have to be one—” Kankuro nods meaningfully towards his left hip, where beneath the blanket Gaara can just make out the lump of his new metal skeletal supports. “—might as well join ‘em.”

“And you’ve been giving them out to the children?” 

It would be much more appropriate for Kankuro to present his wares as a batch to the staff at the nursery to be shared among all the children. Giving them individual possessions will inevitably lead to squabbling. 

“Mm,” Kankuro grunts. “Y’know Inuzuka had a dog? Back on Earth, can you believe it? ‘S what his family did, animal husbandry.” 

“It’s a shame he won’t get much use out of his skills here,” Gaara replies. 

“Meh, he said kids ‘n dogs are about the same, training-wise.” Kankuro has returned his attention to the little doll, smoothing out its clothing and tucking up the corner of its skirt to be hemmed. 

“Is that so?” 

“Search me,” Kankuro replies, holding the doll to the light and squinting, then selecting a needle from his collar. “They seem to like the dog stories, anyway. Now he’s got ‘em all followin’ him around, barking.” 

Gaara thins his lips. He’ll need to speak to Mikoshi, the head of the nursery, about expectations of behavior for the children. Since Inuzuka and Uzumaki have been assigned to childcare duties, their charges have been much noisier in the halls. Last week, Gaara caught a group of them pointing their thumbs at each other, shouting, “Believe it!” 

They do seem much livelier, though. It’s hard not to want to laugh at their antics.

The children’s, that is. Not Uzumaki’s or Inuzuka’s. Their behavior is merely embarrassing. Unbecoming of adults who are meant to be serving as role models. 

“You’ve had plenty of visitors, then,” Gaara suggests. “Haruno was complaining about them crowding up the medical unit while she was trying to work.”

Haruno is in the back of the room, facing the sink and deep in conversation with Akimichi. If she has even noticed Gaara’s arrival, she hasn’t reacted. As Gaara watches, she stands up from leaning on the counter and jabs Akimichi sharply in the chest with her finger, scowling. 

Better not to interrupt her, then. Gaara certainly wants no part of her ire. She can get especially loud when irritated.

“Yeah,” says Kankuro. He still sounds tremendously weary. “Who knew people liked me?” 

Gaara could have told Kankuro as much, but if he prefers to nearly lose his life to discover how well-beloved he is by Sunans and outsiders alike, Gaara will not begrudge him it. 

“Your hubby’s been driving me batshit, though,” Kankuro adds. “Honestly, he’s been worse than the rest of ‘em.” 

The only response Gaara can think to give is, “Lee is not my … hubby.” 

He glances up to see Lee, who has been waiting patiently at the foot of Kankuro’s bed, twist his mouth in an expression of a sort of confused sorrow. 

“I just call ‘em like I see ‘em. Temari told me she caught you two—” 

“He’s my _partner_ ,” Gaara interjects, before Kankuro can detail whatever he thinks it is Temari caught them at. No doubt the tale has grown far more licentious in the peculiarities of Kankuro’s mind. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Gaara catches Lee beaming. A smile brighter than Sol’s rays unfiltered by atmosphere. His eyes have gone closed with his delight. 

“Well your _partner’s_ been talkin’ my ear off about his physical therapy routine. Said he has a bunch of weights and rubber bands ‘n shit to bring up here later. Started writing me a training regimen. It’s, uh, pretty intense.” 

“Yes,” Gaara agrees. “Lee can be like that.”

“You merely need to get your strength up!” Lee bubbles, turning his megawatt smile upon Kankuro. “The more you practice and the harder you work, the swifter your recovery will be!” 

“Yeah.” Kankuro rolls his eyes. “So you’ve said. Repeatedly.” He turns back to Gaara. “Listen, man. I’ve been thinkin’ …” 

“A dangerous prospect for the likes of you,” Gaara remarks drily. 

“Haruno!” Kankuro yelps. “Gaara’s harassing your patient!” 

Haruno cranes her head from where she and Akimichi are now bent over some clear vial of liquid.

“You probably deserved it.” She smirks. “Hey, Gaara. I need to talk to you later about some supply chain issues. I think we might have figured out a workable anaesthetic, but we’ll need to shift some things in the gardens to get a reasonable store built up.” 

“Noted.” 

Kankuro sags back onto his pillows with a groan, shifting back into Sunan to grouse, “So she’ll cut off my damn leg but she won’t cut me a break. Typical.” He sneers at Gaara with hooded eyes. “At least if I’d been put out you guys woulda felt sorry for always treatin’ me like this.”

“Probably,” Gaara agrees amicably. “But you’re here now, so at the moment you’re simply irritating.” 

“Fucksake.” A sniff, and then he’s segueing back into Common to call, “He get mouthy like this with you, too, Eyebrows?” 

“Um!” Lee straightens. “Gaara simply has a very unique sense of humor. His forthrightness with his opinions is part of his charm!” 

“Fat lot of good you are.” Kankuro chuckles, casting his eyes back at Gaara. “So like I was saying. I’ve been thinkin’ … It’s gonna take me a long-ass time to learn to use this thing.” He nods at the leg propped against his bed, its various attachments trailing. “And …” 

Gaara waits for him to continue, arms crossed over his chest. 

Kankuro’s eyes shut, and he mutters under his breath, “Sheesh, not gonna make it easy for me, are ya?” 

“What was that?”

“Nothin’. Uh. Shit. There’s no good way to say this. I’m … thinkin’ the defense squad might not be for me anymore.” 

“Are you frightened?” Gaara raises an eyebrow. “Due to the circumstances of your injury.” 

“Fuck no!” Kankuro makes to sit up, only to wince halfway into the motion and have to ease himself back down onto the bed. “Bank-bless-it, I’m just …” He sighs. “I dunno. I’ve kinda been enjoying makin’ these stupid little doohickeys.”

He holds the doll up in illustration, clicking the button on its back several times. Its hand extends and contracts as if it’s punching the air. 

“And, like, if I’m gonna be outta commission for that long … I dunno, what better time for a duty change, right?” 

Gaara glances up at Lee, who is pretending to pick a bit of grit out from his finger joints, clearly affected by the tension in the air. 

“Who would replace you?” Gaara asks.

“I mean, the twins are pretty damn competent,” Kankuro replies, so quickly that it’s clear he’s been mulling this over for some time. “They could already fight me in circles _before_ I lost the leg, even if they can’t see for shit. And they’re strategic as hell. Real smart cookies, the both of ‘em.”

“You’ve mentioned.” Now is not the time to probe the extent or the direction of Kankuro’s affection for the Hyuuga twins. “And your new contribution to the village would be … making puppets.”

“Not _just_ puppets. All sorts of toys. Baki offered to apprentice me.” 

Baki has been Suna’s primary woodworker for quite some time. Before Gaara’s father’s time, at least. And while his primary focus is upon practical projects, Gaara does know that it was Baki who constructed the marionettes that had so enraptured Kankuro when they were children. 

And it isn’t that there’s no need for toys at all in Suna. Children, after all, need mental stimulation and do benefit, to some extent, from pretend play. It helps them learn about social roles and prepare for adulthood. However, there certainly isn’t enough need for a toymaker to assign it as someone’s sole vocation. The toys in the nursery are designed to last for quite a long time, through many generations of Suna’s children, and to only need occasional replacement in the event that some child should be so careless as to break one. 

“I can whittle up a fair few things,” Kankuro adds. “Figure I can still help with trap-making on the backend, little weapons an’ stuff. And …”

“And?”

“Well, thought I might take you up on that suggestion to join the Council, after all.” 

“You hate meetings,” Gaara reminds him.

“I’ll bring some real work to do,” Kankuro retorts. “Not like I got shit to do but sit around on my ass for a minute, so I might as well listen to those old geezers. Besides …” 

Gaara adjusts his stance, indicating that he’s waiting for Kankuro to go on. 

“I reckon some’a the outsiders are gettin’ ready to petition the Council for childbearing permission,” says Kankuro. “Sure they could use one friendly face who’s familiar with ‘em.” 

“Is that so?” Gaara cocks his head. 

Lee is looking up at the ceiling, now, chewing his lip, a flush coloring his cheeks. It must have been he who disclosed his crewmates’ intentions to Kankuro. He certainly has not mentioned such a thing to Gaara. 

A nervousness bubbles in Gaara’s stomach. If the Konoha Twelve are preparing to enact their reproductive mission, does that mean Lee intends to join them in it? And what will that mean for his relationship with Gaara?

His bed has felt much too large these past two weeks without Lee in it. 

Gaara has been looking forward to the return of his warmth. 

He supposes he could requisition an extra blanket from the laundry—they’ve certainly been tolerant of his request for extra handkerchiefs in light of Lee’s frequent outbursts of tears, not to mention how often Gaara’s needed to replace his sheets recently, waking in the morning to discover his body has responded to Lee’s embrace in the night—but it won’t be the same. A blanket doesn’t have a muscled arm to wrap around his waist. It won’t huff soft sleep-noises into his ear or kiss his eyelids in the morning. Nor will it stay awake with him late into the night, deep in whispered conversation. 

“Yeah.” Kankuro seems not to have noticed Gaara’s anxieties. “So, whaddya say? Sound like a plan?” 

It is clear that Kankuro has given this much thought. The loss of his talents will be a blow to Suna’s defenses, but … Gaara closes his eyes. His brother looks so content, even through his exhaustion, fiddling with the tiny fixtures of the doll. If at least some of his cleverness can be directed to functional weaponry, his happiness might just be a worthwhile tradeoff. And Gaara has always believed that Kankuro’s voice would be a boon to the Council. 

“We’ll make it work.” 

He gives his brother a nod of approval and receives a very un-Sunan smile in return, Kankuro’s teeth all bared. 

“Lee,” Gaara calls, and Lee jumps to attention so quickly that his crutches slip across the floor. “We should be going.”

  


* * *

  


“You’ve decorated your crutches,” Gaara notes a few weeks later, when Lee returns to their room for the evening. 

He’s been working quarter-shifts in the forge, still, while Gaara debates what else his talents can be turned towards. There are many tasks he can no longer take on, given that one of his hands must be occupied by his crutch if he needs to stand, but apparently Tenten has been able to identify a short list of things he can do to help. 

Lee leans against the door a moment to catch his breath, wiping ash off his brow with the back of his good arm. Beneath the crook of his prosthesis, the wooden crutch appears gilded, shining with curling, intricate loops of gold and silver. 

“With metal,” Gaara adds. 

“Oh, yes!” Lee tires more easily since his release from the medical unit—something about relearning to get around with the crutches taking a greater toll on his upper body strength than he expected, he’s told Gaara—and his voice when he reacts is strained. “Don’t worry. It’s all from Tenten’s hairpieces. She and Shino made them for me as a get-well present.” He glances at the ground as if embarrassed. “I … think they were worried I might miss my leg.”

“Do you?” 

What Gaara means is, _Do you regret it?_

Lee shoots him a grin. “Not at all. And look at this!” He fidgets for a moment with something on the crutch’s crossbar, and suddenly a line of red lights illuminates down the front of the wood. 

Gaara steps to the side to evade the lights’ beams. 

“They don’t do anything,” Lee reassures him. “It just looks neat.” 

Gaara offers him a tiny smile, and Lee’s responding grin stretches nearly to his ears. Even sweat-bedraggled and worn down, he’s incredibly attractive. 

Gaara resists the urge to pull him down for a kiss. They have work to do.

“Are you ready to go down to the gardens?”

“Sure!” Lee straightens, though not with his typical enthusiasm, and moves aside so Gaara can pass him on his way out the door. “You still haven’t told me what we’re doing down there, though.” 

“I’ve decided upon a task for you,” Gaara says, “to supplement your work in the forge and your assistance with the translations.”

“Oh?” Lee’s crutch taps a staccato pattern on the stone floor behind them as he hurries to keep pace with Gaara. It’s strange to have him be the one walking behind. Gaara had rather gotten used to having to use the nanites to keep up with Lee. “What is it?”

“I’ll show you when we get there.” 

They proceed slowly down the long path to the gardens. Without the assistance of his nanites, Gaara has never been able to move particularly quickly, and they have to stop once or twice for Lee to lean against the wall and pant. 

“We can postpone this until tomorrow if you’re too tired,” Gaara suggests, as Lee’s sweat drips and darkens the stone floor. 

“No,” he huffs. “No. Keep going. I can do this. I told you.” 

“If it’s going to make your condition worse—”

“It won’t!” Lee insists. “I’ll gladly take on whatever task you’ve assigned me and execute it to perfection, or tomorrow I will carry my entire weight set down to the medical unit for Kankuro without any assistance.”

“That seems unwise,” Gaara comments, but turns and continues walking nonetheless. 

At the doors to the gardens, Lee sags against the wall, eyes closed and face creased with discomfort.

“You’re certain?” Gaara asks one last time, retrieving the ring of glass keys from his pocket. 

“Go on,” Lee says between pained breaths, gesturing weakly with limp fingers. 

Gaara exhales irritation through his nose, but still he unlocks the door. 

He hears Lee gasp behind him, and he realizes then that Lee has never actually had purpose to visit the gardens before. 

Gaara steps aside so Lee can swing himself carefully down the path, and in Lee’s slack-jawed, awe-drenched expression, Gaara sees the gardens through new eyes. The air is misty from the irrigation, sweet with the scent of green and growing things. Rows of lush foliage stretch in either direction, almost to the edges of sight, shaded gold by the temperate overhead lights. Heaps of deep brown soil, loamy and rich, lend their aroma to the milieu, and from the hives along the gardens’ edges, insects bumble lazily from plant to plant, so that the murmurs of the gardeners are drowned out by their hum. 

The rows of crops are actually rather sparse this time of the season, just bulbs and the plants that are hardy enough to overwinter in the chill, but for someone who grew up on the ecologically devastated Earth, subsisting only on artificial sustenance, it must appear like a vision. 

Lee blinks his eyes hard and rubs them with his fist, as if he’s struggling to believe what he’s seeing. 

“It’s lovelier in the planting season,” Gaara says softly. 

“I can hardly imagine that anything could be more beautiful than this,” Lee exhales, turning to look at Gaara with his eyes wide and wet. “Except for you.”

Gaara’s ears go so hot he’s concerned he might catch fire. 

He ducks his head, only for the bare back of his neck, too, to grow warm when Lee reaches for his hand, stroking his thumb across the back of Gaara’s knuckles. 

“Lee!” The shout is shrill, and a thundering of feet is the only warning Gaara has before Yamanaka skids to a halt in front of them in her mud-streaked apron, dragging Aburame in tow. “What the hell are you doing here?” 

“You should watch your tongue, Ino,” Aburame mutters into the high collar of the jacket he seems to wear every day, regardless of the tunnels’ temperature, “because Gaara is the leader of the village. You should show him your respect.”

“Gaara doesn’t care.” Ino tosses her hair carelessly, shedding leaves and bits of twig to the ground. “Isn’t that right, Gaara?”

“I do not,” Gaara accedes. 

“I’m here because Gaara has offered me a position in the gardens!” Lee chirps. 

For a moment, Yamanaka and Aburame both are still and silent, Yamanaka blinking in startlement. Gaara assumes the same is true of Aburame, but he cannot say for sure, because his eyes are, as ever, covered by his dark glasses. 

“So it’s final then?” Yamanaka blurts. “Lee gets to stay? Even though—”

Gaara nods, just the slightest incline of his chin. 

He’s thrown suddenly to the side by a body impacting his. 

The nanites nearly react before Gaara realizes he’s being _hugged_. Aburame smells like beeswax and honey, his bulky jacket musty from lack of washing. His arms are very fierce around Gaara’s shoulders as he whispers, “Thank you.” 

Moments later, another body collides with them. The long tail of Yamanaka’s hair tickles Gaara’s nose.

“So you really do have a heart in there, huh?” she says, the bite of her voice rather undercut by the tears in it. 

Gaara just stands there, unmoving, uncertain how to react. It feels nothing like being hugged by Lee. There is no sudden thrill that races like electricity up his spine, no desire to grab either of them by the ears and lay his lips upon them, but it’s still … very nice. Pleasant. Warm.

“Um, guys?” Lee pipes up. “I think you might be making Gaara a little uncomfortable.”

They truly are not, but the two sets of arms release him anyway.

Aburame steps back with a muttered, “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Gaara breathes.

Yamanaka merely reaches out and brushes away the dirt print left by her apron from Gaara’s sleeve. 

“So, what’s Lee going to be doing?” she asks. “It’s gonna be hard for him to get down on the ground like that. I guess he could handle the berry bushes, but they don’t really need much attention this time of the season …” 

“Lee’s business isn’t in the gardens,” Gaara interjects. “We’re just passing through. He’ll be joining me in the Seed Bank.” 

Ino nearly chokes.

“The _Seed Bank?_ ” Lee’s voice behind Gaara’s shoulder is airy with shock. “But Gaara, you said nobody but the leader of the village is even allowed to—” 

“Most of the cultivars in the Bank are on raised beds.” Of course, this is the case because Gaara himself has difficulty kneeling for too long, his legs’ rapid descent into numbness a lingering effect of his childhood malnutrition. “Nearly everything else can be reached seated or standing. And for the shelves that require a ladder to reach … if you’re working down there with me, I can use the nanites to assist you.”

Lee’s mouth is wide open, but all that comes out is a high-pitched squeak. 

“There are also a number of seeds which I have been unable to identify,” Gaara continues, “which are labeled in ancient Earth languages. Your skills will be well-suited to that task.” 

“I—what— _Gaara,_ ” Lee’s voice breaks. “I can’t accept this honor …” 

“You will,” Gaara states simply. He walks past Yamanaka and Aburame, who are still gaping at him. “Now come. The journey down to the Bank is a long one, and I’d like to return to our quarters before lights out.” 

“Right!” 

The Seed Bank is not directly attached to the gardens—such an arrangement would make its location painfully obvious—but one must pass through the gardens to access the tunnels leading down to it. This serves an additional measure of defense. There are nearly always gardeners awake, tending the crops ‘round the clock, and they value the Bank’s sanctity perhaps the most of any Sunan citizens, due to their unique connection to the plantlife whose origins lie within. So they are tasked to sound the alarm if anyone should try to sneak into the Bank. 

Not that any invader would stand much chance of making it down to the Bank even if they should successfully violate the doors at the back of the gardens. The path down to the Seed Bank curves and twists upon itself, dead-ending and doubling back in myriad, fractal patterns. Even the engineers and maintenance staff who are nominally aware of the Bank’s location would not be able to navigate the labyrinth without a guide.

Which is why it is fortunate that Lee has such a keen sense of direction. 

“You’ll need to memorize this path,” Gaara tells him, as they spiral down into the belly of the planet. “In the event there comes a day that I can no longer accompany you.” 

“Right.” Lee’s voice is firm, the tread of his crutch upon the floor behind Gaara determined. “I’d rather not think about that right now, though. I’m certain it won’t be an issue.”

“Your optimism is misguided.” It isn’t worth the energy for the argument at the moment, not with Lee’s vigor already fading. But Gaara will at some point sit him down and have a very frank talk about the nature of mortality and its inability to be evaded by simply adopting a sunny attitude. 

Lee is huffing and puffing by the time they arrive at the vault doors. 

Gaara presses his fingerprints to the locking pad. 

“I’ll need to have the engineers program the lock to your hand as well,” Gaara notes, “so mind you don’t lose that one.” 

“I’ll do my best,” Lee replies with a laugh. 

The interior of the Bank is not nearly so impressive as the gardens themselves, rather more crowded and far more dimly lit. The only lights down here hang bare-bulbed and shine directly upon the plants, leaving the rest of the Bank in comfortable darkness for the seeds in stasis. The lack of illumination has never presented a problem for Gaara’s tunnel-adapted eyes, but seeing Lee squint down the packed rows of glass jars, Gaara supposes he may need to consider having additional light sources brought down. 

“The trees are all down this corridor,” Gaara explains, showing Lee the alley where the citrus and olives are lined up, bare-boughed and skeletal from the cold. “And along the back wall are the cacti. It will take some time, but I’ll teach you how to care for each of them. There are instructions written down—” Here he nods to the workbench with its rows of tomes that he has not needed to reference in many years. “—but most of them are in Sunan, not Common. We could, perhaps, work together on translating them into something that’s easier for you to read.”

He looks up with a tiny, private smile only to find Lee with tears running down his face. 

“I—I think I need to sit down,” he mumbles.

“Of course.” 

Gaara guides him to the workbench’s single chair and bids him to sit. There is no place for Gaara to be seated, so he summons a loose-packed cloud of nanites from his pod and leaves his hand aloft so that they can keep him suspended in the air. 

“Do you need some water?” he asks. It is the only kindness he can think to offer when Lee is losing so much of it to crying. The handkerchiefs are back in the desk in their room. 

“Um,” Lee gasps. “Yeah, yes. Water would be good.” 

Most of the water used for plant irrigation isn’t potable, but Gaara keeps a small bottle of it beneath the workbench for occasions such as—though not precisely like—this one. Gaara does not, generally speaking, cry, but the Seed Bank is a place of sanctuary, and as such has borne witness to the majority of Gaara’s breakdowns since he has reached adulthood. 

Rather than forcing Lee to move, Gaara sends a tendril of the nanites beneath him to grab the bottle. Lee accepts it from the outstretched black cloud without comment, as if it is every day that a semi-sentient cloud of iron hands him a drink. 

Lee swallows half the bottle in a single long pull, and Gaara watches the motions of his smooth throat as he does. 

“Gaara,” he says, setting the bottle upon the workbench, his expression gone suddenly serious, “you should not have shown me this.” 

“Why not?” Gaara has rarely seen Lee’s face look so grave. 

“We— _I_ —have not been honest with you.” 

“What do you mean?” 

Gaara narrows his eyes. His gloved fingers slip back to the nanite pod on his hip. 

Is this some sort of trick? Has this all been a ruse? Have Lee and the rest of his crewmates spent the past many months earning the Sunans’ trust only to turn on them now that they’ve gained access to the Bank? 

Gaara has never seen anything but honesty in Lee’s eyes. Has never felt anything but truth in his kiss, in his touch. 

But Gaara also knows that he is inexperienced, and therefore prone to being deceived. Is this really all it has taken—a handsome face, dark eyes, a winning smile—for him to hand over his village’s greatest secret? 

The nanites buzz around him, and he fans his fingers so that they form into defensive spikes. Lee is the more physically robust of the two of them, but he’s weakened right now, and Gaara knows the Bank and its tunnels like the blue veins of his arm. He does not want to have to kill Lee, but he will if it comes down to that. 

Gaara lowers his chin, bracing himself. Lee is just staring at him, shaking his head slowly, his long eyelashes dripping with tears. 

“Lee,” Gaara says warningly. “Tell me what you’re talking about _right now_.” 

“It might be easier if I show you.” 

Lee’s fingers grab the hem of his shirt and begin to pull it up.

“Lee!” Gaara snaps, so startled that the nanite cloud nearly drops him to the floor. “This is a sacred space! We can’t just—”

“No,” Lee interrupts him. “ _Look_.”

Lee’s stomach is scarred. Not from fighting—although there are those, too, a jagged gash along one oblique and a pattern of punctures above his navel that look like they could have been a boot print—but rather from a scalpel. A purplish twist of skin that stretches horizontally nearly from one hip to the other, just above the tidy line of stitches that marks where his prosthetic’s port was just removed. 

“I … have no idea what I’m meant to be looking at,” Gaara admits. 

“It’s a hysterectomy scar,” Lee explains. “I know you all don't really do surgeries here, but it’s where I had my … um. My _womb_ removed.” He says the word with faint distaste. Discomfort. 

It’s almost a relief in a way. Gaara has passed many evenings in Lee’s lap under the mild concern that perhaps Lee was not as physically attracted to him as he was to Lee, given the lack of evidence of his arousal, despite the blush darkening his face and the heaviness of his breaths between kisses.

It does, however, present new questions. Chief among them …

“But, what about your mission?” Gaara pries. “To repopulate Earth?”

“That’s—” Lee’s hands are shaking as he lets the hem of his shirt fall down. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We told you we were given a mission, and that we were forced off the planet. And that much is true! It’s just not … the whole truth.”

Gaara sits back, crossing an ankle over his knee. His skin is still buzzing from the adrenaline surge of thinking he might need to murder Lee and drag his body out from the Seed Bank, and then having Lee strip his clothes off in front of him. 

“So what _is_ the whole truth?”

“They—Orochimaru and the rest of them—wanted us to repopulate Earth. But most of us … didn’t want the same thing. _Don’t_ want the same thing. So … we had to leave.”

Lee’s eyes, dark and depthless, are trained on Gaara’s face. His words do not falter as he continues to speak.

“The ship that’s sitting in pieces in your engineering room? We stole it. It was supposed to be our escape pod, in case the situation got too dire on Earth, which is why it fit the twelve of us perfectly … but we weren’t supposed to take it yet. Shikamaru hotwired it so it would launch without the control codes.”

“Is that why it only responds to Uchiha and Uzumaki’s combined touch?” Gaara asks. “Some sort of failsafe?”

“Oh, no.” Lee shakes his head, and although he laughs, the sound is frail. “Shikamaru did that bit too, to get them to stop squabbling. And so they’d stop threatening to chop off each other’s last arm.” 

It’s a comedy of errors that Gaara can only picture transpiring among the Konoha Twelve, trapped in a spaceship with two leaders who cannot agree on anything, including whether or not they care for one another. The Twelve’s dual leaders are just as likely to be overheard whispering words of affection as they are to be found shouting across the breakfast table how much they hate each other. Uzumaki and Uchiha, in combination, are nothing if not volatile. 

“That’s how they lost their arms,” Gaara says, voice flat with incredulity. “They cut each other’s arms off.” 

“It’s a little bit of a longer story than that,” Lee hedges. “But technically yes.” 

Gaara glances at the little clock high upon the wall, soundlessly ticking. “I have time,” he says.

“It was actually the two of them who hatched the plan,” says Lee. “That’s how they ended up as our leaders. They, um, they got caught.”

This revelation comes as no surprise. Gaara can scarcely picture Uzumaki and Uchiha successfully hiding much of anything. The pair of them are neither particularly subtle nor discreet. Even Gaara, who does not, as a rule, wander far from his routine haunts, has stumbled across them more than once tucked into a side tunnel with their clothes half-open, and just as many times in the midst of spitting, vicious arguments. 

“Having sex?” he asks. 

“It’s … not so much _what_ they were doing,” Lee clarifies, a blush creeping up from his collar, “but _how_.” 

“You said same-gender relationships were forbidden on Earth,” Gaara points out. 

“They are, but …” Lee grimaces, lowers his voice. As if the cacti might overhear him. “This is very private information, Gaara. You can’t share this with anyone or use it against Naruto.” 

“You have my word,” Gaara agrees, as much suspicious as he is confused.

“Naruto is … like me. They, um. They wanted even numbers for the project. Six boys and six girls, so that everyone could be paired off. And I guess, technically, we started out that way. We just … didn’t end up the way they expected. None of us did, really.” 

Before this very moment, it had not occurred to Gaara to question the logic of the Earth scientists in having such an uneven distribution of sexes, given that they apparently hand-selected the genes of the Konoha Twelve. Especially given the human gestation period, to have so few women among them makes staggeringly little sense. It suddenly seems obvious that Gaara should have come upon this query on his own. 

“They didn’t _know_ , of course,” Lee goes on. “About me or Naruto. … Or Shikamaru or Hinata, for that matter. And the four of us weren’t the only spanner in the works …” 

“Haruno and Yamanaka,” Gaara guesses. “If they’re together, it’s not likely either of them desires to have children by someone else.” 

“Yes.” Lee nods. “And Shino just … can’t tolerate children. They’re too noisy and overwhelming for him. Tenten thinks all that sort of thing is disgusting, and Neji, well …” 

Lee trails off, chewing his chapped lower lip. He looks so lost and anxious that Gaara wants to pull him in and kiss his anxieties away, to hold him close for comfort the way Lee holds him at night, to tell him it’s all okay. 

But it’s clear Lee’s story is not yet complete. 

“Everyone has their needs and preferences, and none of them really … _aligned_ with what the experiment was supposed to be. Out of all twelve of us, it’s really only Kiba and Chouji who even have any interest in having children, and it’s not like either of them can get _each other_ pregnant.

“Naruto and Sasuke were always supposed to be a pair,” Lee explains. “But Naruto, um … Oh, there’s not really a delicate way to say this …” 

“He doesn’t feel comfortable using his natal genitalia for sexual contact,” Gaara posits. 

“Now how in the stars would you know a thing like that?” Lee gasps, incredulous. 

“It’s not uncommon.” Gaara shrugs. “Plenty of Sunan children choose new names when they become teenagers. Or even in adulthood. Temari did.”

“Oh.” Lee just blinks for a moment, the information slowly processing. “So it’s … not a secret?”

“Why would it be?” 

“Because—well.” Lee’s flush is deepening across the bridge of his nose, his mouth working soundlessly. “Because it’s—it’s not how things are supposed to be.” 

“Perhaps if you’ve predicated your entire value upon reproduction,” Gaara replies. 

“That—I … That.” Lee fidgets, shifting on the bench. He picks up the water bottle, spins it between his fingers, sets it back down. “That … Yes. That makes sense.” He laughs then, a true, if slightly hysterical, little laugh. “Why _would_ anyone care? Why would you care?” 

“I do not.” Gaara’s eyes flick from Lee’s nervously twitching fingers to his face. “If you’re concerned, you have no reason to be.”

“I …” Lee sighs, rubbing a broad hand down his face. “Yes. I was worried. Um, thank you. I know you don’t … you’re not doing anything special, from your perspective. But that means a great deal to me.” 

Gaara merely nods, willing to accept the thanks for what it is. 

“You were explaining the details of your departure from Earth.”

“Right! Right. So, after Naruto and Sasuke got caught … things got ugly. Fast. That sort of … waste. Of, uh, genetic material …” Lee’s flush only darkens. “It wasn’t allowed. And it just … turned into this huge, public thing. There was a massive fight, right out in the middle of the square, in front of everyone. I think Orochimaru expected them to apologize and … I don’t know. Promise to do it the right way next time?” 

“The right way?” 

“Like …” Lee grits his teeth. “Oh, don’t make me say it. I hate talking about this sort of thing. It’s vulgar.”

“To copulate with the intent of reproduction,” Gaara supplies.

“There.” Lee smiles at him. “You always say things so precisely and scientifically. It’s much nicer.”

Gaara does not clarify that he only chose the words he did because he has never been taught the word for ‘fuck’ in International Common. His tutelage in the language was solely geared towards diplomatic uses, which by necessity eschewed the idea that he might wish to swear at someone … or to discuss sex in frank terms with his foreign partner.

“Um, but anyway,” Lee continues, gesticulating with his metal hand in a way that manages to convey no meaning at all. “You’ve met Naruto and Sasuke.”

“I have,” Gaara accedes. 

“They weren’t going to apologize for anything, obviously. And then Naruto came right out and told them that he was a man, and that he wasn’t going to be used as an incubator, and that they couldn’t _make_ him do anything, and—” 

“And?” 

“And Orochimaru … did not agree with that,” Lee says, his voice gone very tight. “So Sasuke—well, you’ve seen how he is about Naruto. He wasn’t going to let anyone put their hands on him, of course—” Lee swallows, loud. “So he. Put a stop to that. To _them_ , Orochimaru and the rest of them. Lost his arm and Naruto’s, too, in the process of getting out of the restraints, and then just … ran. What else were we going to do but follow them?” Lee shakes his head, as if awed by their own brazenness. “None of the rest of us really wanted to stay there, either. I knew the way to the hangar, and Shikamaru knew the access codes, and … and the rest is history.” 

He rests a hand upon his abdomen and makes very direct eye contact with Gaara. 

“This was the first thing I had Sakura do, the moment we were out of Earth’s orbit and Naruto and Sasuke were stitched up. So that even if they managed to catch us and drag us back, they couldn’t … _use_ me the way they wanted to.” 

“As an incubator.” 

“I don’t think of it like that, really,” Lee clarifies. “Those are Naruto’s words. It’s just that … the thought of it makes me sick. My body doesn’t usually bother me that much, but every time I thought about carrying a child, I felt like I was about to vomit.”

“I understand.” 

It is not so dissimilar to the feelings Temari has shared with him, on the rare occasions that they discuss private emotions. For Temari, her greatest source of discomfort is the low tone of her voice. It’s unsurprising that Lee’s might be his ability to bear a child.

Lee smiles at him, warm and soft. 

“I’m so glad that you do.”

“So is that all?” Gaara asks. “The _whole truth_? If they haven’t come for you yet, I doubt they will. Suna is not exactly friendly to outsiders.”

“That’s the story, anyway, right?” Lee grins. “But no, that’s not all. Not entirely. There’s … one more thing I should probably tell you. To lay all the cards on the table.” 

“Go on.”

“I overheard us being talked about, on the comms report. I know I’m not supposed to eavesdrop, but I was so worried, and—” 

“About you?” Gaara arches an eyebrow. He hasn’t heard so much as a whisper of a rumor about the Konoha Twelve in a long while, since long before they crashed upon Kaze’s surface. 

“Not by name. They called us, uh. Outlaws, I think was the word they used.” 

Gaara racks his brain for a moment before it dawns on him. “The _pirates?_ ”

It is difficult for Gaara to imagine. The goofy, guileless, often reckless but genuinely goodhearted man across from him, a cutthroat space pirate. It just doesn’t seem to fit. Like trying to root a plant in a pot too small for it. 

“I mean …” Lee scratches the back of his neck. “That’s probably not that inaccurate, either. We were on the run. We couldn’t stay on any of the near-Earth colony planets, but we still had to stop and fuel up from time to time, and we needed supplies. But we didn’t have any money, and we couldn’t risk our identities getting out until we got somewhere _safe_ , so—”

“So you _were_ pirating,” Gaara breathes. He can hardly believe it. The notion seemed so utterly absurd he had disregarded it out of hand. “And you ended up on _Kaze?_ ” 

Their planet is the most notoriously hostile to bandits of any description. It’s the sort of wild, half-cocked plan that Gaara would only attribute to Uzumaki and Uchiha. 

“We didn’t always plan to throw ourselves upon your mercy,” Lee says. “Our original destination was Kiri. It’s just that … our past caught up with us there.”

“There’s a sizeable communication hub on Mizu,” Gaara notes. 

“Yes. And our descriptions are pretty unique,” Lee agrees. “Twelve refugees on a foreign ship … it didn’t take long for them to figure out who we were, once they started looking.” 

Gaara exhales heavily, rocking back in the cradle of his nanite cloud. 

“Well, you’re stuck here now,” he says. “There isn’t any colony further out than Suna, even if your ship hadn’t been scrapped. So if someone from Earth comes looking for you—”

“We’ll defend ourselves, and the village,” Lee cuts him off. “But … I don’t think it will be a problem. Earth technology is good, but it doesn’t last that long outside of orbit. If it hadn’t been for Shikamaru jury rigging the ship’s fuel system, we never would have made it this far. The last Earth ship we saw was just approaching Mizu, and Shino took care of that one pretty easily.”

“I believe we heard about that as well,” Gaara mentions. “A ship that mysteriously broke up out of orbit. It’s ironic, I was actually hoping some of the debris might get caught in Kaze’s gravitational field. I thought that with the extra metal, Haruno might be able to get a jumpstart on rebuilding your prosthetic.” 

“Oh, I wouldn’t—” Lee shakes his head rapidly, so that the blunt ends of his hair fly, boyish and charming. “If someone else needed it more, I’d much rather they have it.” 

“That isn’t how this works, Lee. You don’t get to sacrifice yourself endlessly.” Gaara speaks firmly, precisely. So there is no risk of him being misunderstood. The conclusion of Lee’s story has given him much to consider, but there is one fact he must ensure Lee comprehends. “If your condition gets worse—if you stop being able to contribute entirely—there’s not going to be anything I can do to protect you. I’ve put quite a lot on the line to accommodate your needs, and the needs of your crewmates, but Suna isn’t going to change. _I’m_ not going to change.” 

“But Gaara,” Lee says, with a high-pitched giggle of disbelief. “Do you really think that if I told you this story when we first arrived, that you wouldn’t have put us out in the desert as an unacceptable risk to the village?” 

He reaches out, and lays his metal hand upon Gaara’s leg. Strokes the inside of his knee with a cold thumb.

“Can’t you see it?” he whispers. “You’re already changing.” 

Something in Gaara’s chest constricts. He knows now that the outsiders can more than handle themselves, that even if adaptations must be made for them, that they have brought the village so much of value. 

But more than that … Lee and the rest of the Konoha Twelve are _part_ of Suna now. And as part of the village, they are worthy of Gaara’s protection. He cannot allow them to come to harm without harming the very heart of the village itself. 

It is a different way of thinking. A foreign one, still. To see the village not as a unit, a whole from which parts can be taken, but as a constellation of individuals. Each with their distinct strengths and their distinct needs. 

He looks up. Lee’s gazing at him now, his dark eyes reflecting the golden flickers of the distant lamps, crusts of salt clustered in his long lashes. He licks his chapped lower lip. 

“Can you come here, please?” Lee scoots aside in the seat to make room for Gaara to join him, holding out his good right hand in invitation. “I’d very much like to kiss you right now.” 

Gaara does not feel his feet touch the floor as he crosses the last half-meter between them. Lee’s body is warm as it always is when he pulls Gaara in to sit beside him. 

It’s a little awkward, maneuvering enough on the narrow seat so that they can face each other, but soon enough Lee’s cool metal fingers are cupping Gaara’s cheek, stroking his thumb along Gaara’s cheekbone, as if mapping the veins that appear there and trace a path back to the tips of his ears. 

“I can’t believe you aren’t more upset,” Lee murmurs. 

“I was more upset when I thought you were going to leave me to go have children with one of the women from your ship,” Gaara huffs.

Lee’s eyes pop wide.

“You thought that was about _me?_ ” He snickers. “ _No!_ Chouji and his girlfriend—Matsuri?—have been talking about getting married soon.”

“How lovely for them,” Gaara says, a bit irritably. It’s growing late, and he is tired. And perhaps a small amount jealous. He’d much rather be lying in their bed right now with Lee wrapped around him, so that he can turn these new thoughts over in his head in the dark. Consider them from every angle. And then, most likely, argue about the finer points with Lee. 

“Isn’t it just?” Lee agrees, without the slightest hint of sarcasm. “But as for _you_ , unfortunately you’re stuck with me.”

“There’s nothing unfortunate about it,” Gaara replies, turning his head to press a kiss to the port in Lee’s palm, noting with interest the gasp the gesture draws from Lee’s mouth. “At least not on my part. I just hope you’re not too heartbroken about never being able to go back home.”

“Gaara, no,” Lee says, and his voice is so soft and so sweet right now that Gaara feels his own heart breaking, just a little bit. “This is my home now. _You’re_ my home.” 

Gaara shuts his eyes, because he worries that if he keeps looking at the honesty of Lee’s face right now that he may cry. 

“But this is the end of your entire way of life as you know it,” he hisses. 

Lee pulls him close, until their lips are just barely brushing. 

Gaara can taste Lee’s breath when he whispers, “Then why does it feel like my life’s just starting now?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Come chat with me on Tumblr [@ghoste-catte](https://ghoste-catte.tumblr.com), and don't forget to check out the other Naruto Sci-Fi Week entries [@naruto-scifi-week](https://naruto-scifi-week.tumblr.com)!


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